RAIL passengers are being hit by rail fare hikes that are ‘truly staggering’, according to the Labour Party transport spokesman Andy McDonald.
The increases, which came into effect on January 1, will see rail passengers paying up to £2,100 more for an annual season ticket than they did in 2010. A Virgin Trains season ticket between London and Birmingham has shot up by £2,172 since 2010 and now costs an unbelievable £10,200 a year!
This 27% increase is matched and even superseded in percentage terms by other rail operator hikes. The cost of a season ticket between Walsall and Nuneaton has gone up by 43% since 2010 while a season ticket between London and Brighton will cost a thousand pounds more (a 28% increase) than seven years ago bringing it up to £4,536.
According to research carried out by the TUC, rail fares have gone up by an average of 27%, more than twice the rate of inflation and wages in the past ten years. In terms of wage increases, fares have risen more than three times faster than wages over this period.
Rail travel has been priced out of the reach of the working class and middle class.
While train users are seeing their wages effectively cut in order to pay to travel to work, the same is not true of the profits and share dividends being paid out by the privateers.
The dividends paid out by the private rail companies to their shareholders went up by 21% last year. Commenting on the fare hike TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady said: ‘Private train companies are milking the system, and the government is letting them get away with it.’
O’Grady says this as if it is somehow a surprise – the entire privatisation programme of the Tories is designed specifically to allow the privateers to ‘milk the system’, to extract maximum profit from running previously state-owned industries and then run them into the ground, cutting wages and staff regardless of the consequences to passenger safety.
This is the Tory policy and they are quite prepared to give taxpayers money to these same private companies to help them maximise their profits. All the loss in revenue to these companies because of collapsing rail infrastructure, systematically starved of investment since privatisation, has been compensated by payments out of the public purse.
Last year, train operators pocketed £107 million from Network Rail, while commuters who really suffered got back just £26 million in compensation claims. In other words, the train companies made £81 million out of delays – no wonder they don’t care about running a train service, their profits are guaranteed even if the whole system collapses.
Similarly GTR, the company at the heart of the fight by the rail unions against imposing driver-only trains and endangering the safety of passengers, are being compensated by the Tories for lost revenue due to strike action. The taxpayer is footing the bill, estimated at £28 million, for losses incurred by GTR. This is on top of the £1 billion the Tories are paying them a year to run the service into the ground.
GTR is being paid to spearhead the drive by the Tories to smash up health and safety on the railways as a prelude to destroying all legal limits on the right of companies to exploit workers with no restrictions.
With the overwhelming majority of commuters and workers supporting the rail unions’ fight for public safety and for the demand that the railways be renationalised, the time has come for the TUC leaders to stop just complaining about privatisation and join the fight or be removed and replaced by a new leadership prepared to defeat the Tories.
This means bringing down the Tories and putting an end to privatisation of all the public services by calling a general strike to kick them out and go forward to a workers government that will nationalise the railways and every major industry and the banks under the control of the working class.
Come to the ATUA National Conference on February 11 (See ad page 3) where the issue of building a new leadership in the unions to take this fight forward will be discussed and acted on.
