Why your summer holidays might be doomed

The first LNER train I booked on Sunday from Durham to London was cancelled due to ‘action short of a strike’. I hadn’t heard the phrase before, but I instantly admired it. It’s so impressively confusing. With a strike, you know whose side you’re on. You can look up the salary of a train driver, for instance, discover that it’s £70,000 after only a few years of training, and become icily indifferent to their plight. But action short of a strike? What is it?

Action short of a strike, ASOS, turns out  to be an ingenious way of screwing your boss while still getting paid. ‘It means members can incorporate strike action into their daily working life,’ says TESSA, the Transport Salaried Staff Association. Simply work the bare minimum and the inevitable result is confusion and delay, as the Fat Controller used to say, and as I found out on the second train I booked.