June 24th - What the by-election results mean for the rail strikes
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 24 June 2022
⏱️ 5 minutes
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Summary
By-elections - always a good excuse for a protest vote at the best of times but the two that the Conservatives lost yesterday in Wakefield and Tiverton and Honiton saw voters with plenty of grievances. How, exactly, does that fit into a travel podcast? Well, I think the results partially point to dissatisfaction with how the government is going about resolving the trains issue as the second of a three day strike by RMT union members passes. The message that this is the fault of Labour doesn't seem to be holding sway with voters and it could mean that the government's so far reluctance to give any concessions on the bargaining table might yet yield.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Simon Calder, welcoming you to the final independent travel podcast of the week. |
| 0:08.4 | And I'm speaking to you from yet another railway station. I've got a train heading north from |
| 0:14.7 | Finsbury Park quite soon. But before it arrives, I've got plenty of time to talk to you |
| 0:19.8 | about the rail strikes and just my take on what might happen as a result of the Tivetan and Honiton plus Wakefield by elections. |
| 0:33.5 | What, you might wonder, has that got to do with railways? Well, apart from the fact that, oh, just in about 10 minutes or so, there's a direct train. Can you believe it? From Tivetan to Wakefield, that's a thing. Every couple of hours, cross-country will be, of course, making that journey, but not tomorrow because we have yet more rail strikes. The third day of action by members of the |
| 0:56.6 | RMT in their campaign over pay, over jobs and over working conditions. That's going to be very |
| 1:04.8 | disruptive. It's already been disruptive this morning. Cry key, I had to, normally I go out sometimes early in the morning to |
| 1:13.0 | Heathrow to see what's going on, sometimes do some media stuff there, and it's a very nice, |
| 1:20.9 | easy service from London Paddington, gets you out good and early to either the airport or to |
| 1:27.0 | Hazan Harlington and then you cycle down from there. |
| 1:30.1 | Very straightforward. |
| 1:31.0 | Been doing it for years and it's fine. |
| 1:32.7 | But not today. |
| 1:33.8 | Instead, I had to get up at 4 o'clock and get the night bus, which is very good, very professional service. |
| 1:42.1 | I like it a great deal, but it does take an hour and a quarter |
| 1:46.0 | to get from central London to the airport. |
| 1:49.0 | So, I quite like it to be sorted out. |
| 1:52.0 | Lots of other people would love it to be sorted out, |
| 1:54.0 | and at the moment it seems all a bit of a shambles. |
| 1:58.0 | However, my belief is that having seen the way that the Conservative |
| 2:04.6 | government was so roundly defeated in these by-elections, bearing in mind that by elections, |
| 2:10.6 | everybody can make a protest vote, I think, as the, crikey, as the Gail picks up here, I think that we might be in the situation where |
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