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Hello and welcome to political thinking.

My guest this week has just celebrated ending the longest train driver strike in history, a strike that was blamed for crippling the railways and angered many, many travellers.

His members have got a 15% pay rise over three years. He is

Mick Wielen, the General Secretary of Asleff. He said that his member's strength, resilience and determination was what had won that

pay rise. Others say it was down to his crafty negotiation style.

Make Wheeling, welcome to political thinking.

Thank you, Nick.

You finally got a deal.

After all that time, how did you celebrate?

By talking to the press, as soon as it becomes public knowledge, you and your colleagues,

and once you've done that I won't, I'll admit I got changed and went down the road,

and got out of the way with a couple of colleagues, I had a couple of guineases and they went over to my family.

Did it feel like a big moment, a moment of real success of triumph?

It did a couple of weeks ago.

I think we never quite understood why we were in the dispute. We didn't look for the dispute and we came through the COVID process and thought, well, we don't quite lead the same approbations as every other key worker but yeah we did make those

decisions we did get key workers to work we did move food and space around the

country to find that the people that we work for who were still making millions

in profits and paying dividends to their shareholders,

all the sudden told us they couldn't give any pay rise anymore because they'd done a dodgy deal

with the government.

And if I mean, Crow be honest, I didn't think it would take 24 to 26 months to resolve it.

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