For some Londoners, Eddie Dempsey is about to become public enemy number one. The RMT boss has threatened to execute one of the worst Tube strikes in years, with a rolling walkout set to cause a four-day Tube shutdown from September 8 to 11. The planned disruption is so impactful that it has caused Coldplay to reschedule two of their Wembley dates. The band have released a statement saying that the strikes would make it “impossible” for the concerts to go ahead.
But to many, Eddie Dempsey is a hero — and not just because he’s postponing Coldplay concerts. The bolshy, baby-faced 43-year-old successor of Mick Lynch was already well known before he took over the role of RMT general secretary this March, having supported Lynch on his much-lauded 2022 and 2023 media rounds. During this period, he was working as assistant general secretary, Lynch’s second in command.
Now he’s the big boss, and he has big plans. His upcoming Tube strikes are part of a battle over “pay, fatigue management, extreme shift patterns and a reduction in the working week,” according to an RMT spokesperson.
The RMT is on a bit of a roll at the moment: their 2022-2024 rail strikes ultimately resulted in victory for the unions, with improved pay deals concluded region by region. And in January last year, Sir Sadiq Khan found £30m from City Hall reserves to avert a threatened strike by the RMT that would have crippled the post-Christmas return to work — sparking accusations that Khan had “given in to union blackmail”.
From New Cross beginnings to picket lines and politics
Dempsey is a trade unionist through and through. Born in 1982 to Irish parents, he grew up on Woodpecker Estate in New Cross before starting work on the railways in his twenties. Prior to his high-profile role in the RMT, Dempsey was London secretary of the Connolly Association, an Irish emigrant workers organisation and the oldest migrant workers' organisation in Britain.
“I learnt my politics through people I met on picket lines, in union branch meetings, in the homes of veteran comrades in London such as Monty Goldman and Max Levitas who gave me my Marx and my Markievicz,” Dempsey wrote in a blog post in 2019. He claims that his first political act was a demonstration against the Iraq War.
“My politics are pretty straightforward,” Dempsey told the New Statesman this June. “I want to see people being able to work and have a good standard of living. I want them to have public services that educate you, look after you when you’re sick, and give you retirement in dignity. I want to rebuild communities and rebuild a sense of shared responsibility. And I want a world that lives in peace.”
This is Dempsey’s whole shtick. An honest, working man, with simple, socialist goals. When he won the appointment of general secretary in March, he made headlines for sharing how he would celebrate: by playing bingo at his local social club with his wife.
Dempsey’s controversies: social housing and Ukraine
Dempsey, “a proud south Londoner” and Millwall FC fan, now resides in Islington, where he lives in council housing. This ruffled feathers in June 2022, when the Daily Mail reported on his living situation and suggested he was a “hypocrite” for living in council housing despite his £100,000 pay package.
Mick Lynch came to Dempsey’s defence, telling the paper: “When did council housing become for people that are poor? You don’t have to be poor. How is he blocking houses [for the less well off]? Council properties should be available for the whole population so that we have a mixed group of people living in those council houses.’
And RMT spokesperson added: “He wants to live in London, which has been his home since he first started working on the railways [...] Eddie thinks publicly owned accommodation should be an option for all.”
But Dempsey’s biggest controversy of all happened earlier that year, when a photo was uncovered of Dempsey posing with Russian separatist paramilitary leader Aleksey Mozgovoy in 2015. The photo was part of an obituary written by Dempsey following Mozgovoy’s assassination in May 2015.
When the scandal broke, Labour’s Chris Bryant, a member of the Commons foreign affairs committee, told the Daily Telegraph that Dempsey should apologise. “The writing has been on the wall in relation to Putin and his territorial ambitions for more than a decade now, and anybody who has not been able to see that should step aside from the political arena. He should apologise — and be ashamed of himself,” Bryant said.
An RMT spokesman said: “The union does not support either Vladimir Putin or his actions in Ukraine.” In response to this, Dempsey said: “I fully agree with the union’s position.”
More recently, the RMT has demanded an end to British military aid to Ukraine, describing the UK as playing “a belligerent role in international relations by supplying British-made weapons, military support, credit and billions of pounds in public funding” in Ukraine's defence.
Dempsey’s current stance on Gaza
As for Dempsey’s stance on Gaza, he has declared the situation a genocide, and criticised the Labour government for being complicit in its continuation. Following the “Red Line for Palestine” protest outside Parliament on June 4, Dempsey told Sky News: “I wanna congratulate the Palestine solidarity campaign for their action outside parliament today and the MPs who came out to join it.
“I think anyone watching this appalling genocide that's been unfolding for months and months, and watching the complicity of our government in that over this period will be pleased to see the change in rhetoric.
“We absolutely need an immediate arms embargo. We absolutely need sanctions on the Israeli government. And we need to understand just what role, and how far our government has has been involved in what's been unfolding.”
“We're we're supplying weapons components to carry out the bombing of children, hospitals, schools, civilian infrastructure, in what is an open-air concentration camp. That's complicity in one of the great crimes of this century. And I think a lot of the politicians who've gone along with this, for all of this period, will not be remembered by history.
“So we need this [...] we need to see action now. We need to see an urgent arms embargo. We need to see sanctions on the Israeli government. And we need to have people held to account for their role in this.”
