There’s been a Tube strike in London today.

Cue news reports and vox pops with stranded commuters, little detail on the reasons for the strike and nothing on why this strike is likely to be, unfortunately, another missed opportunity for us to rethink how we work and travel.

If you go back just 15 years, just before the banks realised that their assets were a house of worthless-mortgage cards, we had proper jobs, proper contracts with terms and conditions. For many of us working in the service sector or the ’knowledge economy’, we trudged into offices, five days a week, to sit at computers and make phone calls. That’s just what we did, without question, because that’s the way it was. ‘Working from home’ was code for hungover but just productive enough to justify being paid.

Post-pandemic, after a serious public health emergency forced many of us to find other ways to work, we have a huge opportunity to make some progress. Four-day weeks (on 100%, not 80% pay) are now being trialled by many companies. The offer of hybrid working is pretty much the norm in all current job ads. Surely that should mean a Tube strike is an inconvenience, rather than a headline story?

That might be true at some point in the future, but until we decide how 21st-Century working patterns will evolve, we’re stuck with mixed messages. Industry, generally speaking, sees the benefits of flexible working, but the government and its cheerleaders in the press are conducting a sustained and organised campaign against working from home becoming a norm. We expect a Conservative government to block any form of social progress (the clue’s in the name), but are the papers just supporting them just to be supportive?

Not exactly. Rupert Murdoch is supposed to be dead set against WFH. The reason? Some commuters still buy newspapers to read in the way to work, so an increase in WFH means lower sales in an already declining market, lower ad revenues, etc. It’s fair to say that Lord Rothermere (another proprietor who doesn’t actually live, let alone work, in the UK) and his Mail stable newspapers see the same threat.

In this environment, it’s hard to have an honest national conversation about the future of work and what’s best for working people. How can we talk about realigning people’s work-life balance and rethinking how technology can help us to work smarter and more productively, if the papers are constantly portraying workers (civil servants are a favourite target) are lazy and feckless when not in the office. Newspaper profits are clearly far more important than contributing to improving the lives of working people.

But if we did have that conversation, we could then also rethink the nature of our towns and cities. If there are no rush hours, or huge office blocks filled with thousands of workers, we can reimagine our town and city centres - including how we travel around them.

Which brings us back to the Tube.

Part of the reason for the current round of strikes are the cuts that Transport for London are having to make, because the government won’t underwrite losses made during the pandemic. London needs the Tube as a central part of its mobility strategy for the next 10, 20, 30 years: over the same timeframe, TfL has the additional pressure of reducing emissions to meet Net Zero targets. The organisation needs investment to meet those targets - set by the government at COP20 in Glasgow last year - as well as whatever else is required for a modern city with changing work and commuting patterns.

I wonder how future historians will judge this era of humanity. Will the pandemic prove to be a catalyst for much-needed change in the early 21st Century, or seen as another opportunity for progress that was squandered by blinkered politicians?