SNP nationalised our trains on April Fool’s Day — and turned the service into a national joke

THE SNP took control of Scotland’s trains on April 1, and I suppose the date should have given us a clue as to what was going to happen.

I predicted it would go pearshaped, I just hadn’t banked on it happening quite so quickly as it has.

Just seven weeks in and we already face a summer of discontent and service cuts.

Passengers are going through a torrid time with cancelled trains and late services. Fares haven’t been permanently cut and they are too confusing. Industrial unrest is looming this summer.

Yesterday, it was announced that, from next week, 30 per cent – nearly a third – of all services are being axed.

ScotRail bosses are blaming a lack of drivers but they should have seen this coming and acted sooner to train new staff. The rail service is meant to operate seven days a week, but drivers are only contracted to work six.

Crazy

You couldn’t make it up. It means that the only way to get staff to work on Sundays is via overtime on their rest days. How many of you would want to work under such a crazy arrangement?

More than a hundred services have already been axed over the past week due to drivers not working overtime. They don’t have to and why should they?

I said when the SNP took over the trains that some unions would be licking their lips in anticipation. I had a feeling that rabble-rousing leaders like the RMT’s Mick Lynch would sharpen their industrial action pencils. Sure enough, that’s exactly what is happening.

It’s the job of any Transport Minister to keep up a dialogue with workers through their unions. But Transport Minister Jenny Gilruth, who is now in charge of the trains, isn’t doing that. Unions tell me she isn’t coming to the negotiating table to talk about their pay demands. And that this has led to the situation we now have, where unions are balloting for industrial action – strikes – over the summer.

When I asked Miss Gilruth yesterday how long the services cut will go on for, she couldn’t give me an answer. But sources tell me that it could be 2024 before there are enough drivers to get back to normal. What a disgrace.

We are through the pandemic, we want to get people back on public transport – but Scots can’t do that if the trains aren’t there.

Both Jenny Gilruth and ScotRail are saying that the current situation is down to the unions.

Miss Gilruth says it is up to them to come to the negotiating table. It cuts both ways.

ScotRail and the Transport Minister are selling this services cut as a way of providing some certainty that your train won’t be cancelled.

That will come as no comfort to hard-pressed commuters, many of whom are at their wits’ end already with the service provided by the SNP.

Another problem we have when it comes to getting people back on trains are the fares. They are too high.

Travelling from my home in East Kilbride to Edinburgh would cost me around £716 per month, while season tickets still cost up to a few thousand pounds.

Let’s look at it another way and apply what I call the family test. If myself, my wife and our daughter decide to have a day out in the capital it will set us back more than £100. So, what are we going to do? Drive of course. Getting fares down is key to recovery.

We also need a simpler system. Ask any rail user and they will tell you that. The SNP has promised what it grandly calls a Fair Fares Review but, of course, we have yet to see it.

The effect of all of this won’t be felt just by commuters. Anyone looking to enjoy a late night in town will need to rethink how they get home, with the last service between Edinburgh and Glasgow leaving at 10.15pm, for example.

What this will do to this year’s Edinburgh Festival, finally looking forward to some normality for the first time since 2019, can only be imagined. The same goes for our beleaguered hospitality trade, which was effectively put on ice for large parts of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Pubs, bars and restaurants will surely be badly hit if people are forced to travel by car for a night out or dash for the last train rather than catch one at a more sensible hour.

We probably shouldn’t have been surprised by this fiasco, though, it’s not as if the SNP doesn’t have form when it comes to public transport.

Take ferries, another creaking system run by the Nationalists (though thankfully not all of them). The ferries that they don’t run are largely fine, as you would expect. The ones they are in charge of are not.

Ignored

We have a crazy situation where we have the Transport Minister – that’s Jenny Gilruth again; under her sits Transport Scotland, then we have CMAL which owns and buys the ferries and then finally, on the West Coast, CalMac – which gets most of the blame but only actually operates the ferries.

It is not CalMac’s fault that we have an ageing fleet that keeps breaking down and it’s not its fault that Nationalists ignored the advice of their own experts, CMAL, not to award a contract to build new ferries for Arran and Skye to the Ferguson’s yard.

As the Auditor General has pointed out, we still don’t know why ministers ignored that advice, though we can have a pretty good guess – that it was all about making an announcement at the SNP conference.

CMAL’s warnings that this was the wrong deal to do have turned out to be right, with the Port Glasgow yard being nationalised and the incomplete ferries more than twoand-a-half times over budget.

The knock-on effect of this debacle is that any vessel replacement programme has been held up.

Sensible

Meanwhile, islanders have to put up with cancelled services on a regular basis, meaning they can’t get to hospital appointments, family gatherings, go to work or in some cases go to school.

The effect on daily life is utterly horrendous.

We need to have a sensible conversation about how we run and procure ferries.

Some ideas may well be contained in the Project Neptune report that was commissioned by the Government, but we have no idea what’s in it because they won’t let us see it. The SNP’s secrecy over Ferguson and ferry procurement has to stop.

From trains to ferries, the people of Scotland deserve better. And I haven’t even got on to the issue of our buses or roads, which need far more investment.

Key strategic routes such as the A75 and A77 or the A96 and A9 need to be properly upgraded but, thanks to the SNP-Green coalition of chaos, there’s very little chance of that happening.

If a government wants to run transport systems, then it has to be open with the public it serves, and it has to demonstrate that it has some idea of what it is doing.

Those of us who will have to put up with fewer trains or fewer ferries and who have to drive on the country’s substandard roads should not have to tolerate this.