As I write this, I am sitting on an Avanti West Coast train from Edinburgh to London listening to arguments break out between the passengers. People are arriving at seats thinking they had reserved them weeks ago, only to find someone else sitting there also holding a valid reservation.
Welcome to the summer of 2022. When we look back on it in years to come, this will be remembered as a surreal time — when everything was falling to pieces and the Government’s response was to stick up a summer-long “out of office” sign.
It was once the case in this country that, if something important was broken, ministers would face calls to be sacked and hauled onto the TV night after night until they produced a credible plan to fix it. That is how it felt when I was a Minister - and quite rightly so. But, amidst the chaos of 2022, it seems like quite a quaint notion.
Now, nobody seems to bother to demand anyone’s resignation because they know they won’t. The bar for judging ministerial competence has never been lower.
These days, rail connectivity between London and Manchester can be slashed overnight, the Transport Secretary can refuse a request to meet from the two Mayors — and no one bats an eyelid. Seriously, when did this become acceptable?
Yesterday Emily Maitlis gave the MacTaggart lecture in Edinburgh and addressed the same question of standards in government. I would recommend everyone reads every word: it may well come to be seen as the defining speech of our times.
For the first time, and with forensic precision, we have an insider’s account of how British democracy, standards and institutions have been stealthily and systematically degraded over recent years. Emily’s account of her treatment by BBC Newsnight made me think of my own appearance on it last week.
I had been asked to talk about the Avanti situation. Instead, when the programme started, it opened up as a discussion about rail strikes and Labour’s response to them. While there is some overlap, they are separate issues.
Once, Newsnight would dissect an issue like Avanti and the Government’s response to it. Not now, it seems. The whole package was predicated on the Transport Secretary’s self-serving line that all the problems on the railways are down to the unions and greedy workers.
This is a big problem because it is letting down the passengers who are suffering. Only the Government can resolve the issues that Avanti passengers are experiencing right now - be they problems with reservations or the dangerous daily stampede at Euston to get on Manchester services. If the Government are let off the hook, chances of a resolution are slim.
The politicisation of public functions can also be seen in the statement issued by Avanti announcing the emergency timetable. It slipped into the kind of highly contentious language you would not expect to see in an official response. You couldn’t help but think that the Department for Transport had written it for them.
We are entitled to better than this. Amidst the chaos we are living through, we deserve a Government which actually tries to govern rather than sit back and fight political and culture wars.
In our letter to the Transport Secretary, Sadiq and I had offered to help him broker a solution. I can’t see how it helps anyone to have that thrown back in our faces.
However, in the absence of any meaningful Government action on Avanti, I will today meet the company again and require an urgent plan from them for the full restoration of the London to Manchester timetable. This is important as the reduction in services is hurting our visitor economy, as we are seeing with ticket sales for Manchester Pride this weekend. If Avanti fail to provide it, I will ask the new Prime Minister to strip the contract from them.
Based on the way politics has been in recent times, there is a possibility it will be simply ignored. But I really hope they don’t carry on like that. For the good of the country, the change of leader needs to bring a change in ways of working.
Such is the enormity of the challenges facing us in the autumn, politics need to rediscover the art of dialogue, decency and compromise if the country is to pull through.
This morning, the words of Emily Maitlis should be ringing in the ears of Liz and Rishi. A Conservative Party which once believed in upholding standards in British institutions stands accused of the opposite. We have seen how the Republican Party in the US has gone down this path and how dangerous it is. If the new PM continues to take the Conservative Party the same way, it will be the end of them - and damaging for us all.
