The railway blob has taken virtue-signalling to extremes
It was British Rail that acquired the unfortunate yet fully deserved nickname British Fail for its risible shortcomings when the trains found themselves labouring under the dead hand of the state.
Thirty years after privatisation, the moniker could apply just as easily to Network Rail – the railway blob that does a dreadful job of maintaining Britain’s railway tracks.
In a country where Covid hero worship of key workers elevated rail industry employees to the status of near demigods, perhaps that sounds harsh. It isn’t. Rail travel in this country has long been abysmal, and not only is it not getting better, on multiple measures it is getting worse.
Somehow though, long-suffering commuters find themselves stuck in a topsy-turvy dream-world where striking train drivers receive inflation-busting pay deals for doing less work and some routes are now so eye-wateringly expensive that it is cheaper to fly via Europe.
This, it has to be said, is not normal. It is a national disgrace. Train passengers have lost nearly 1m minutes to delays caused by signal failures alone in the past five years, according to Network Rail’s own data.
Meanwhile, a record 370,000 train services across the UK were fully or partly cancelled last year – equivalent to one every 90 seconds on average.
Having turned incompetence into an art form, only Network Rail could think that the answer to such utterly damning service failings lies in one of the biggest displays of virtue-signalling nonsense that has surely ever been seen from a major organisation.
And this, remember, is an outfit that for some reason recently felt compelled to fork out £3,500 of taxpayer money on a “pride pillar” at London Bridge station featuring flags representing “demisexuality” and “polyamory” – so it had already set the bar extremely high.
Network Rail’s latest project elevates its dedication to meaningless woke guff to an entirely new level, via a vast report dedicated to weeding out terms and phrases it thinks might offend passengers.
Except, in the parallel universe that Network Rail clearly now inhabits, even the word “passenger” is no longer acceptable. Yes, you read that right. This is what it has come to: an institution so tin-eared and bereft of ideas that its solution to the crisis on our trains is a new set of guidelines dedicated to replacing gendered language with gender-neutral terms.
Never mind that “passenger” isn’t even a gendered word. When the mission is as lofty yet vague as wanting to “eliminate discrimination, advance equality of opportunity, and foster good relations between different people”, apparently details don’t matter.
After all, even the brains behind this spectacular display of navel-gazing can’t make up their minds. By calling their new manual “Speak Passenger” – a grammatical car-crash if ever there was one – they’ve immediately broken their own silly rules, at which point Network Rail has surely surrendered the right to ever be taken seriously again.
It doesn’t stop there. There are 134 pages of this gobbledegook. According to the manual, an “expectant mother” or “pregnant woman” is now to be referred to as a “pregnant person”, which will no doubt come as a surprise to, well, certainly all the women out there, and probably the men too, come to think of it.
Staff are discouraged from using terms like “boyfriend”, “wife” or “husband” and should instead opt for “partner” or “spouse”, while “mother” and “father” are to be replaced with “parent”.
The irony as always with the woke movement is that in pandering to a tiny minority, they risk alienating the vast majority of their already disenchanted customer base for good. As a waste of time and money it is hard to beat.
This woeful saga is immediately reminiscent of the storm that engulfed Unilever, a company that disappeared so far down the rabbit hole of political correctness that management convinced themselves they could change the world.
This sort of grand self-delusion is bad enough at any large company but it was particularly misguided from one that makes products as mundane and forgettable as shampoo and stock cubes, and where its financial performance had long been overwhelmingly mediocre.
As top fund manager Terry Smith said of Unilever, its obsession with sustainability had come “at the expense of focusing on the fundamentals of the business”.
The same goes for Network Rail. The vast majority of people don’t care about any of this, and they certainly don’t appreciate being patronised. How many of us want to be addressed by someone using “everyday language” as the guidebook suggests, when another train cancellation has prevented us from getting to work or back home?
Apparently this will help “dissipate the anger” we all feel at being stranded.
Wrong again. If Network Rail really thinks this sort of irrelevant codswallop is what passengers – yes, passengers – are most concerned about, then there truly is no way back.
As the architect of this drivel, chief executive Andrew Haines should step aside now, and while he’s at it, ministers should disband Network Rail tomorrow and replace it with an organisation that isn’t so utterly out of touch with the real world. Only then can train travel get better.
It is classic displacement activity. Personally, I’d be happy to never hear another train announcement again as long as I live if it means an improvement to services. Commuters want their trains to run on time. In fact, if they ran at all it would be nice. Less overcrowding would be great too, along with a service that is affordable.
Nobody wants to be fobbed off with excuses because their train was cancelled due to a few leaves on the line. Being told that the train is being taken out of service at the next station isn’t made any less frustrating because it was said in an overly familiar tone. In some ways, it is worse because it smacks of an attempt to make light of what is a genuine grievance. It also blurs the line between the paying customer and those tasked with providing a vital service.
“To put passengers first, we have to speak their language,” Haines says. Is that so? Then how about this Mr Haines: do something useful – drop the virtue-signalling and sort out the train signalling. Commuters are sick to the back teeth of being taken for fools.