Shame on the politicians
THE mood music surrounding UK industrial relations heading into June didn’t inspire confidence in early resolutions and a summer of discontent seemed inevitable even before a week of rail disruption, including three full-day walk-outs, that brought much of the GB network to a standstill (see Headline News, p8). While Rail Express is apolitical, it is, as you would expect, passionately pro-rail. There is no winner from rail disruption, so we think both sides need to continue to talk to find a way forward. And that is why we were particularly dismayed to receive a blatantly adversarial and partisan press release from the DfT, which included the following lines attributed to the current transport secretary: “While union bosses waste time touring television studios and standing on picket lines, I am busy getting on with the job at hand and modernising our railway.” We respectfully have to point out that successive transport secretaries have generally served our railways pretty poorly, even the few that have truly understood how the network works. If politicians really had been getting on with “the job at hand”, then complete electrification of the Midland Main Line (first seriously discussed in the 1980s) would have happened long ago, to pick just one example. Our railways, and those who support them, deserve much, much better. Instead of talk about a national freight plan (see our Freight Insight, p10), we need positive action from politicians to bring about significant modal shift, which means standing up more strongly to a powerful and vociferous roads lobby. The same politicians also need to do more on “the job at hand” to support the volunteer-inspired and largely volunteer-run preserved railways that perform critical roles in energising local economies, while preserving important parts of our collective transport history. We know, because you have told us first hand, that you are having to think much harder about which diesel galas you can attend this summer because of the cost of living rises, particularly transport costs. While we understand that there is no quick fix for this, we’d like to invite all of our politicians to try harder on behalf of our railways. Much harder.