Southern rail: chaos for commuters
Spare a thought for Southern rail passengers, said The Times. For months, they’ve suffered endless delays and cancellations on the routes between London and Sussex, Kent and Surrey, as a result of a campaign of sporadic disruption by the RMT rail union. Some commuters have even lost their jobs because of it, and estate agents are warning that house prices in the region could suffer if the situation doesn’t improve. People probably thought things couldn’t get any worse. Yet this week they did, when the RMT held a five-day strike, the longest stoppage on the railways for almost 50 years. Southern rail, which is operated by Govia Thameslink Railway (GTR), was forced to withdraw hundreds of trains and run an emergency timetable, causing chaos for up to 300,000 passengers.
The RMT claims this dispute is all about protecting passengers, said David Leam in The Daily Telegraph, but that’s “shameless bluster”. The union is simply resisting reforms to “outdated working practices”. At the heart of the dispute is a row over who should be responsible for shutting doors on trains. GTR wants drivers to do it, on the basis that this frees on-board guards to concentrate on helping passengers, and allows trains to run even when a guard is unavailable. But the RMT insists this system – which it believes downgrades guards’ jobs and puts them at risk of redundancy – will endanger passengers. In fact, there’s no reason to believe it would. Train doors have been safely operated by drivers instead of guards for decades on many lines; some four in ten Southern trains already operate this way. The RMT is being disingenuous, said The Guardian. But so is GTR: it is seeking to blame all its ills on “irrational union obduracy”, ignoring the fact that it’s one of the most badly run rail franchises in the country. It’s time for both sides to get round a table and start putting the interests of passengers first.
Some have called for GTR to be stripped of its franchise, said Simon Calder in The Independent, but the Government wants to let this dispute play out. It believes Britain’s railways need to be dragged “into the 21st century” – and just as the Thatcher government was happy to let the National Coal Board take on the National Union of Mineworkers, it’s “subcontracting its pursuit of modernisation” to the bosses of GTR. “Southern passengers are regarded as necessary cannon fodder, caught up in a war of attrition that will ultimately benefit future travellers and taxpayers.”