Tweet Check
Welcome to RAIL’s new fact-checking service, which aims to answer your questions, debunk the myths, and get to the unvarnished truth behind some of the most common claims and queries we spot on social media.
Party trick
RAIL’s verdict: With party conference season now concluded for another 12 months, there has been no shortage in the supply of tweets concerning the raft of policies announced (or quite often re-announced) by the three major political parties over the last few weeks.
This includes this intervention from Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who once again restated his party’s ambition to bring all rail infrastructure and passenger operations under public ownership.
The justification used in this case to rid the network of privatelyowned train operating companies was the late arrival of a number of high profile attendees to the Labour conference in Liverpool on September 26.
What Jeremy neglected to mention, however, was the cause of the delays which was a signalling outage in the Wembley area.
This is, of course, an area for which Network Rail is responsible and as NR is already publically-owned, perhaps renders this example as a poor choice of evidence for why any further nationalisation is needed.
Jeremy’s omission of this crucial fact inevitably led to a barrage of less than complimentary replies (not all of which are suitable for repetition here) about the folly of being selective in the use of facts, or not having full knowledge of them in the first place.
Speech defect
RAIL’s verdict: This deliciously ironic tweet was too good to resist publishing in this column, and refers to Secretary of State for Transport Chris Grayling arriving seven minutes late to address the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham on October 1.
With the timetable meltdown on Northern and Thameslink services in May still fresh in people’s minds, news of Grayling’s failure to stick to the conference schedule gave rise to a number of sarcastic replies from Twitter users.
Tim Shipman wrote: “The speech is running six minutes late. Sadly that isn’t enough for a refund…” while Tom Quinn described it as ‘an actual metaphor for the shocking state of the UK’s worsening rail services’.
Huffington Post News Reporter Jasmin Gray wrote that the delay had sparked disbelief from waiting journalists as well as several Labour MPs in attendance including shadow Transport Secretary Andy McDonald who told her: “If calamity Chris Grayling can’t deliver himself to the conference stage on time, what hope is there for the rest of the transport system?”