Labour’s motion calling on the government to release all documents and advice relating to contracts awarded to PPE Medpro has also now passed

Labour received £4.7m in donations between July and September, more than any other party, PA Media reports. PA says:

The sum received by Labour is significantly greater than that donated to the Conservatives, which, according to Electoral Commission data, received £2.9m over the same period.

The Liberal Democrats recorded about £1.7m, according to returns submitted to the Electoral Commission, with more than £11m in total donated to 19 separate UK political parties.

Lynch, the RMT general secretary, said the government was to blame for not allowing the train companies to make an offer acceptable to his members. He said:

The government are running the playbook and the strategy for the railway companies and directing what is going on. They have held back even these paltry offers to the last minute.

He claimed the rail companies were not losing out from strike action, because they were subsidised by the government, and he described this system as “perverse and corrupt”. He explained:

They get indemnified for every day of strike action. They are paid the money that they would otherwise have lost, and the only people that lose are my members who lose their wages and the public and these businesses in hospitality who lose their income as well, while the people I negotiate with lose no money whatsoever.

It is the most perverse and corrupt system we have ever seen in British business where those people that are conducting the dispute make no losses whatsoever and the taxpayer subsidises those people by money given directly from the DfT [Department for Transport].

He said the timing of the latest strikes was “unfortunate”, but he claimed the union was forced to act. He said:

We have to respond to what the companies are doing, and they’re doing that very deliberately. They’re seeking to ratchet up the dispute.

He accepted that, although the additional strikes were over Christmas, when rail services were very minimal anyway, they would create further disruption for passengers. In the past Lynch had said the RMT wanted to avoid strike action over Christmas.

He defended the RMT’s decision to object to a move to driver-only trains. Driver-only operation was “less safe”, he said. Women and disabled passengers wanted to see guards on trains, he said, because they felt that was safer and more welcoming. When the presenter, Justin Webb, put it to Lynch that driver-only trains still had another member of staff on board, and that they just did not have a staff member operating the doors, Lynch said that was wrong. He said most of these services did not have anyone else on board, apart from the driver.