Sometimes you hear someone say something and you think to yourself, “Yes, that makes sense.” Then, you actually think about it for more than a split second and it makes no sense at all, to the point that you kick yourself for having ever thought it made sense in the first place. This happened to me today when I was listening to an interview with the transport secretary Chris Grayling.
Grayling, as most people realise, is uniquely awful, even for this uniquely awful government. He gives the word incompetence a new meaning. There is nothing – new train timetables, a drone over Gatwick Airport, handing out a contract worth nearly £14 billion for ferry services to company that owns no boats, nor experience of running ferries – that Grayling can’t fuck up. With the increase in train ticket prices, he has excelled even himself.
When attempting to justify his argument that people who did not use trains should not be expected to subsidise those who did, I first nodded. Hmm. He’s got a point here. Then, I thought again. How could this apply across the board to the public sector? Here’s how:
- Why should I, as someone who has not had a major hospital operation the year subsidise someone who has?
- Why should people who don’t drive cars pay taxes to pay for roads they don’t use?
- Why should I have to fork out a small fortune to support a fire service I haven’t ever used?
In all these instances, and many more, I think to myself, what the fuck am I on about? It’s an accepted way of life that we all pay towards the NHS even if we don’t need it (at the moment). We might not always need police officers at this moment in time, but they’re handy to have around when we do need them? And whilst I don’t personally require the services of a paediatrician, I’d rather there were enough of them to ensure children don’t die. All of this shows up the paucity of Grayling’s argument. And there’s more.
Train fares are, by and large, obscenely expensive. Yes, there are a few where people can get cheap tickets if they book ages in advance, knowing the exact dates and times they are travelling, but many people cannot. It is a railway system geared purely for profit, of squeezing as much money as possible from the passenger (or customer as they are often called).
We need more people to use trains, not less, and we need more services and routes. And if we are going to encourage people to leave their cars behind, fares need to be affordable, not least to those who cannot currently afford to travel by train.
Grayling was, infamously, a member of parliament when his erstwhile colleague George Osborne was lying to the country that we were “all in it together”. Thanks to him and his pals, we’re “all in the shit” together today. And his bonkers idea of confining the cost of one form of transport to the poor buggers who use it needs to be scrapped as soon as possible. Just like Grayling should be.
