Read what Ben Clasper had to say in his programme notes ahead of our National League South clash with Farnborough.

I never thought I would see the day I would agree with Richard Madeley but the deluge of statistics he belches out to try and support his pursuit of RMT Union Leader Mick Lynch were bound to throw up the odd accuracy eventually, a sort of ‘even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day’ approach to journalism.

This week, during that pursuit which has a persistence and futility not seen since Wile E Coyote spotted a little blue bird eating a pile of corn, Good Morning Britain’s interrogator-in-chief quoted the statistic that the rail strikes had cost the hospitality industry £1.5 billion in lost revenue and based on our experience that is probably true and we can also vouch for how incredibly damaging it has been. As a football club we are now in a very painful financial situation because of disruption to our fans and I would conservatively put our losses due to the rail strikes at £40k. Today will be yet another Saturday in which a large section of fans will be unable to get to Champion Hill and we enter the sixth month of the season without having had a single home league game on a Saturday with fully functionally rail transport.

When you combine that with another conservative estimate of £80k losses from fixture re-arrangements you can understand why everyone at the club is having to work incredibly hard to keep the club in the stable position they have fought so hard to deliver. Fortunately, after five seasons in the footballing school of hard knocks we have learned a thing or two about dealing with crises and one of our mantras is always to focus on the cause, not the symptom. This is something Richard might want to try before igniting his ACME rocket roller skates and aiming for the edge of the cliff – a strike is the last resort at the end of story, it is a symptom, not the cause of the issue that needs fixing.

The strikes in multiple sectors are to ensure fair rates of pay for people in jobs we were told not long ago were the most important workers in the country and those people will be the source of much of that missing hospitality industry income for years to come if they have any reasonable level of disposable income. Choosing instead to increase the profits of the rail company owners is not going to ‘trickle down’ to any football club or hospitality business in the UK for the very simple reason that most of the owners are not in the UK to spend it here. I would love to see the owners of the trains that trundle through East Dulwich rock up at Champion Hill and dispose of their income at our turnstiles, but they probably have enough local clubs at home in France to spend our rail fares at.

There is though something to admire about Richard’s misdirected pursuit, he’s playing all the right notes, just not necessarily in the right order. There is a story here for Richard to get angry about, there are villains for Richard to pursue but they aren’t the ones swapping nursing or train uniforms for hi-vis jackets and standing on the picket lines, they are the ones who handed millions of pounds to publicans and peers and then crashed the economy to leave key workers in this situation in the first place. Like I said, if you really want to solve a problem, focus on the cause, but people like Richard don’t like to do that, their instinct is to protect those they recognise and attack what they don’t understand. So, it was predictable which side Richard would empathise with in any debate between Government and Unions after he noticed how good Number 10 staff were at wheeling suitcases of wine out of the local Tesco while trying not to be seen.

This club is a community and contrary to what some people think about us, that is not political, or partisan, it is not left or right, it is standing up for the whole community. We aren’t about to abandon any section of that community because their fight makes our life tougher because that’s what those who seek to divide communities want to see happen. So yes, the strikes are hard, yes, they are causing real hardship at the club but in recent years this club has needed our community to stand up for us and so now it’s our turn, the politicians may have stopped clapping when the photographers left but we still recognise the value of our local transport and nursing staff and still believe they should be rewarded for that. I guess I was right, I never did see the day I would agree with Richard Madeley after all.

Happier New Year.