SOUTHERN rail yesterday lost its appeal to attempt to ban the Southern rail drivers’ strike, so the two day strike has gone ahead.
The strike began at one minute past midnight last night and will continue until 11.59pm on Wednesday bringing Southern rail to a complete halt. This is Southern’s third attempt to stop the strike. First they challenged the legality of the ballot. Then they took train drivers union Aslef to the High Court to attempt to rule the strike illegal.
A move which Aslef rightly said challenged the fundamental right to strike. This Southern lost as the High Court ruled in favour of Aslef on Friday. Finally Southern attempted to overturn the High Court decision yesterday with an appeal calling for an injunction against the strike.
Simultaneously Tory Home Secretary Amber Rudd, whose Hastings and Rye constituency is served by Southern, added fuel to the fire. Giving full government backing to Southern and against the strike she said: ‘It is totally unacceptable that our local area and communities will suffer further strikes over driver only operated trains’ adding that ‘Southern’s plans, opposed by the unions, will lead to better journeys for passengers.’
By 4:30pm yesterday afternoon the news broke that Lord Justice Elias, sitting with Lord Justice Lewison and Lord Justice Lloyd Jones, backed the right for the Aslef drivers to take lawful industrial action.
Mick Whelan, general secretary of ASLEF said: ‘Industrial action is always the last resort. We don’t want to inconvenience the travelling public, and our members don’t want to lose money. We are going on strike because we have been forced into this position by an intransigent management that has not been prepared to negotiate with us.
‘Even now, all we want is for the company to sit down with us and negotiate – properly, sensibly and in good faith, not to simply restate their old entrenched position – and do a deal for the benefit of passengers, staff and, of course, the company, like ScotRail did with us earlier this year.
‘We have tried everything possible this year to reach a sensible and workable compromise with Southern in the interests of passengers and management as well as of staff.’ Whelan added: ‘Chris Grayling says this strike is political. It isn’t. It’s industrial. The only people who have been playing politics here are Chris Grayling, Peter Wilkinson at the DfT, and Southern.
‘Passengers don’t want driver only operation. They want a guard on every train. Because they know that DOO is inherently unsafe. The company – which cares only about profit, not about passengers – knows, as we know, that there are serious problems with the platform/train interface. It has been our policy for more than 15 years to try to eradicate driver only operation.
‘DOO is old, not new, technology, designed for four-car 317s on the Bedford to St Pancras line in the early 1980s at the fag end of British Rail when everything was about managed decline. But we have seen an increase in the number of passengers we are carrying on the railway every day. We now have 1,100 passengers on a 12 car train and two seconds to check 24 sets of doors is simply not adequate, to deal safely and properly, with the travelling public.’
