October 4th - End of the line for HS2
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 4 October 2023
⏱️ 7 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Yes, it’s another rail strike day in England. I’m at London Waterloo, normally the busiest rail station in the UK. Train drivers belonging to the Aslef union are walking out for the 15th day in a long and bitter dispute over pay and working arrangement. Meanwhile in Manchester, the prime minister is set to announce cancellations from Manchester to Birmingham – not just of all trains today, but of all high-speed in the future, as Rishi Sunak axes the important parts of HS2.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | And those whistles tell you that, yes, today's independent travel podcast comes for the |
| 0:08.6 | thousandth time from a big railway station. |
| 0:12.3 | The one I'm at today is London Waterloo, normally the busiest in the UK. |
| 0:18.7 | In fact, the busiest transport terminal in the whole of Europe. Not today, |
| 0:23.7 | which is Wednesday the 4th of October. I'm looking across to the destination board. And you can go |
| 0:30.5 | anywhere you want to as long as it's Woking, Basingstoke, Guildilford or Felton. |
| 0:38.2 | These are basically commuter belt towns that you could reach, |
| 0:43.3 | but you're not going to be able to go to, for example, |
| 0:46.2 | the beautiful city of Southampton, Bournemouth and so on, |
| 0:51.9 | or indeed to Winchester, anywhere like that, Portsmouth, if you were |
| 0:56.9 | hoping to go across the Ireland of White. And that's because we are on the 15th rail strike by members |
| 1:04.9 | of the Aslef Union. As a reminder, this dispute has been running since the summer of 2022. |
| 1:13.5 | It's all to do with pay and working arrangements. |
| 1:18.2 | The Aslef Union, which the train drivers belong to, says that it wants a decent, no strings increase to |
| 1:26.8 | to reflect the fact that they have been working all the way through |
| 1:31.3 | COVID and continue to live a good, safe service. |
| 1:35.8 | If the government, which ultimately is going to sign off any deal, is going to have a change |
| 1:43.1 | in any of the working conditions well they want to |
| 1:45.2 | sell those for a few percentage here and there but Mick Whelan the general |
| 1:51.1 | secretary of as left said they want us to take a 20% pay cut and give up all |
| 1:56.7 | our terms and conditions we're not going to do that. |
| 2:01.6 | Ministers, meanwhile, say, look, we are offering them an increase from £60,000 to |
... |
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