“After Peterborough,” says Daily Telegraph columnist Tom Harris, “We may need airline-style security for our railways“, although he adds: “My experience as the responsible minister leaves me little faith in the ability of British railway bosses to introduce it efficiently.” Where to begin? It appears that a lone nutcase/psychopath has launched a vicious knife attack on innocent rail passengers and on the basis of that, Harris concludes that we will need to turn our railway stations into airports. Can you imagine?
A couple of weeks ago I took a flight out of the UK from Adge Cutler International Airport in Bristol and to be fair the place has really got its shit together in recent years. There were something like 35 flights in a two hour period when we were leaving and the system worked very well. I was searched bodily by one of the security staff, my Skechers shoes were checked by another for the presence of a bomb, my hand luggage went through a modern X Ray machine before I reassembled my bits and pieces, heading off to departures. The whole thing, I am guessing, took around 20 minutes. This procedure happens at every airport in Britain. I’m assuming that Harris wants to introduce something similar to all our railway stations. That could be fun: there are 2597 of them.
I am a semi-regular train user, often during the so-called rush hour, and I know just how rammed our local stations can be. Using the automated ticket readers works well enough for most of the time, but there are often huge queues. I was at Birmingham New Street last week and there are multiple entrances and gates to the trains. That will be fun, then, installing airline-style security, all around the Bull Ring, not to mention all the other stations big and small around the country.
And such a system would by its very nature need to be installed at every station in the country because if it wasn’t, wouldn’t a knife-wielding loon simply board a train at a small station instead. Or is Harris’s Big Idea to install security on every platform, too? Christ, there wouldn’t be enough room for passengers, what with the sheer numbers of security staff who would be needed pretty well 24/7.
As for the small stations, well, that would be even more fun. For example, Denton Station in Greater Manchester saw a grand total of 54 passengers in the year from 2023/2024. How boring would that be for those security staff, seeing an average of one person a day? You’d still have the X Ray machine, of course, and you’d be frisked if you were wearing your Skechers. It sounds a tall order, doesn’t it?
Actually, it’s more than a tall order: it’s fucking ridiculous. No wonder Harris has “little faith in the ability of British railway bosses to introduce it efficiently.” Neither would I, but then, I wouldn’t have much faith in anyone else trying to introduce something as absurd as this. He boasts about his own experience in government which includes a couple of years from 2006 when he became Parliamentary Under Secretary for Transport before being sacked. We do not know whether he was sacked for being shit, but that was the last government job he had in the Labour government. In 2019, he showed his true colours – mainly blue – by defecting to Boris Johnson’s Conservatives, admitting that he had secretly voted Tory in 2017, too. What a man! What principles. And now he writes for the increasingly unhinged Telegraph. I have little faith in his ability to walk and chew gum at the same time.
It’s just kneejerk nonsense, exactly what you expect in the mainstream right-wing media. Rail travel is almost as safe as it gets, aside from what appears to be a one-off attack by a deranged knife man and the odd derailment. We don’t need every single railway station – no, wait: any railway station – to introduce airport-style security because unless this becomes a regular occurrence it’s simply not needed. I’ll wager more people are pissed off about not being able to get a seat on their train than they are worried about being violently attacked.
Tom Harris appears to be yet another supposed journalist who wants to convince everyone that nothing works and everything is broken. He wants us to feel shit so we are persuaded to vote for a more authoritarian, hardline right wing Farage-type government. Well, it did appear that nothing works and everything is broken under the last Conservative government from 2010 to 2014, which he supported loyally from the safety of his office laptop but actually some things are getting better, like knife crime, which is actually falling.
That train attack was awful and I would rather dwell on the courage of the train crew who prevented even more bloodshed by their bravery and professionalism, as well as the emergency services who run towards danger when the likes of us run away from it. Sure, it’s a bad news story when anyone is injured as a result of a violent attack, but Anthony Williams, the ALLEGED perpetrator is the bad guy in a world of good people. And we can’t let attacks like this take away even more of our freedoms, as Harris seems to be suggesting.
