Union members hold station protest over West Coast

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Rail union members have been protesting at stations around the country ahead of an announcement by ministers next week confirming who will be running services on the West Coast Main Line beyond December 9.

The RMT union has been calling for the renationalisation of the West Coast route since Virgin’s original legal challenge in Autumn.

Acting under the joint Action for Rail umbrella, union members have been at Euston station today (October 12).

RMT general secretary Bob Crow said: “In light of the West Coast fiasco it would be an absolute disgrace if the most popular option, public ownership, was ignored.

“Opinion polls and online surveys now show that between 70 and 90 per cent of the British people support full renationalisation of the railways.

“It’s not the evaluation or the franchising model that’s wrong, it’s the whole greed-driven, free-for-all of privatisation that has brought Britain’s railways to their knees and turned us into a global laughing stock.

“Some shabby little whitewash of a Government review that doesn’t examine the cheaper and more efficient model of public ownership would doom us to repeat the failures on the West Coast time and time again until the political class wake up to reality.”

Kevin Rowan, regional secretary of Northern TUC, said: “The expensive shambles of rail franchising extends well beyond the fiasco of the West Coast mainline as these figures indicate that a majority of the UK’s rail routes will soon be on corporate welfare due to a mixture of bogus train operator projections and government and departmental incompetence.

“The evidence that the privatised, fragmented rail industry is not serving passengers, workers or the economy continues to grow. It is high time that serious consideration was given to renationalising the rail industry. In fact, doing so would not only end the shambolic and embarrassing experience of franchising, which costs a massive amount and delivers only uncertainty, renationalisation would save the tax-payer £1.2 billion per year.”

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