People who build walls get forgotten or derided by history

When I was a reporter in Oxford, I discovered a file of photos - in the Oxford & County Newspapers amazing press library - of the old Cutteslowe Wall. It was built in 1934 to divide a private estate from the public one. It was two metres high and had spikes along the top.

It was a living symbol of snobbery and how the rich derided the poor, and how the powerful feared the powerless.

It became a focus for idealistic protest and was pulled down twice by the city council, for the last time in 1959. When I was there in the 1980s, the bus route still failed to recognise that the wall wasn't there any more.

I thought about it over the weekend, as the world woke up to the fact that the new American president really does want to mark his border with Mexico with a wall, and realised that - with the possible exception of Hadrian - the builders of walls are derided or forgotten by history. What gets remembered is the moment they are removed.

Trump is a symbol of the decline of the West, but - if he builds the wall - it will come to symbolise his presidency in a very specific way.

I've been wondering these last few months what tactics we should pursue against walls, whether they are Brexit walls or those built by Trump. The tactics must depend on how we found ourselves in this situation.

Here is my take on it. First, it was the fault of the free market right, for the hands-off cult. What started as an important recognition of the power of market forces became, instead, an insidious loss of belief in any kind of action at all.

Their Panglossian view of the world leeched them of a belief in government. We elected them and they became powerless custodians of the nation.

That was the father of Trump. The mother came from the left, on the back foot for the past half century, and with their very own brand of powerlessness. Instead of ideas for the future, they gave us conspiracy theories, symbolic gestures, politically correct linguistics. It was in its way another catastrophic loss of belief in their own potential - endlessly trying to emphasise the present (Blair) or remake the past (Corbyn).

Instead of opposition, they gave us 'protest', which simply acted out their own powerlessness to do anything but supplicate.

It follows that the path we liberal-minded people should follow, it seems to me, is to recognise that we need a better vision - which means no more defending the past, no more defending defunct institutions. It means looking beyond the European Union - so that we are not defending the empty symbolism of tolerance, but we promote what is most important and we reinvent these institutions most likely to make tolerance and progress real.

This is not a plea for compromise, though it may look like that. Though it is a plea for strategic withdrawal on some issues - it seems insane to me that, in a nation of pushing 70 million people, we can't recruit and train our own to populate the NHS.

It is a plea for thinking afresh, so that we can challenge Trump and Farage, and the other brutes, on the future and win. And it seems to me that we most urgently need to rethink free trade so that it becomes a genuine tool of challenging enterprise and not a hidden force for plutocracy.

See my book Cancelled! on the Southern Railways disaster, now on sale for £1.99 (10p goes to Railway Benefit Fund).

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A DIY guide to the No-Trains?-No-Show! passenger strike

"We are the people of England,
that never have spoken yet..."
G. K. Chesterton, 'The Secret People'

"It looks as though The Revolution has started in Sussex and @davidboyle1958 is leading it," said a tweet on Thursday after my description of the first #passengerstrike event at Brighton. The tweet was by my friend Jonathan Calder, who is an extraordinary humourist - and the ironies are obvious.

It isn't so much that I'm not a very revolutionary person - though I'm not - but the idea of The Revolution, or any revolution actually, happening in deeply English Sussex seems unexpected enough to raise a smile.

I can vouch for it. As I walked down the packed train on its way to the confrontation with Southern Rail, I asked everyone if they would join me at the barriers and refuse to show their ticket - and have some cake at the same time.

A surprising number of them said they would, even if just for a little while, and so many of them behaved in the same way that I've come to believe it is what the English do when they are at the end of their tether. They didn't look me in the face when I asked them, having read my explanatory letter. They just gave a little nod, barely perceptible.

I know what that little nod means. It means they are not given to anger, and are embarrassed about showing it - but they recognise, as I do, that something must now be done. It was a nod of determination, which ministers ignore at their peril. And there they were next to me a little while later, as good as their word, for the party by the gates.

The article I wrote about it does seem to have had an impact. It was published mid-afternoon on Thursday and I was still getting tweets and retweets at the rate of about one a minute well into that night. That doesn't count all the 3,500 people who shared the article separately.

It struck a chord and so many people have got in touch to say they want to do something similar and asking for the letter. This blog isn't encouragement to do so - but, if they do, I do have some advice and an updated version of the letter I used.

There was some hilarity when I suggested that the No-Trains?-No-Show! event borrowed something from Gandhi, but Gandhi understood that this kind of action was - by striking at the symbols of their power (their ability to check the tickets they have failed so miserably to fulfil) - a way of reasserting our own dignity.

For Gandhi, it was making salt; for us it is tickets. When, together, we refuse to show our tickets, we force Southern either to appear ridiculous by opening the gates or to show aggression to the passengers they pretend to support. Either way, we win.

It is, I hope, a model for how to campaign against the arbitrary power of monopolies more generally. And please note, this is not a protest. In a traditional protest - with slogans and demands - you simply become supplicants; you act out your own powerlessness. By refusing to make ourselves easy to process, we are reasserting our power.

Traditional protest, with all its defunct symbolism of the Russian revolution, has served us badly recently. We need something else if we are not going to be completely pushed around - as we are being by all sides in the Southern Rail mess.

By doing it politely and without shouting, and with party hats and cake, we are doing it in a way that we reserved English can take part in.

That's the theory. A few bits of advice:

1. Don't do it alone: it takes some courage to get up and give letters to people on a crowded train.

2. Do it when people are most likely to be able to help - probably not in the mornings on their way to work.

3. Be charming and understanding, not just to people who are too busy to stop, but to the poor ticket collectors caught in the middle. Tell the manager to open the gates.

4. Don't fall into the usual trap: you're not holding a protest; you're waiting to get through the gates and will disperse as soon as they are opened for you. But you're not going to show your ticket to Southern or use their machines until they can run a railway again.

5. Stay resolutely non-aligned as far as the sides of the industrial dispute go. The whole purpose is to carve out a voice for the passengers again.

6. Dress: very conventional. It unnerves the politicians.

7. Have fun. Smile. Wear silly hats.

In the meantime, here is an updated version of the letter I used:

Dear Passenger

Please join me for a 'No Trains? No Show!' event at the barrier - with cake!
Like you, I’m a regular user of GTR services (Southern, Thameslink etc) and – like you, also, I expect – I have now reached the end of my tether.

I’m a [INSERT PROFESSION/HOME TOWN ETC]. I live in West Sussex and have XX children. I need trains just like anyone else. But I’m not any more prepared to submit my ticket (which I’ve bought) to the company for inspection, when they have manifestly failed to provide me with an adequate or reliable service, now for eight months.

I’ve been wondering what Gandhi would do in these circumstances. I have come to the conclusion that he would join with others and refuse to show his ticket at the barrier at [INSERT STATION].

So I’m inviting you to join me at the barrier tonight, where we will refuse to show our tickets. We’ll do so politely, demanding to see the manager to open the gates for us – on the grounds that they are not keeping to their side of the contract. We will also have cake to celebrate our revival of the Blitz spirit in the face of such official indifference.

If the gates are open already, we will claim victory and try again another day. If they stay shut, we will have proved the company's aggressive attitude to their passengers and made a stand. Either way, we win!

If you’re too busy or you just want to get home, we quite understand. Please give us a thumbs-up 👍. But if you can even spare a few minutes, it would be an enormous help. In the meantime, I’ll come through the train in a moment and see what you think, and collect this copy (I want to use it again!). If you join us, I’d be ever so grateful: this will be a very civilised and good-humoured event. It will only work if it is fun!

Thank you so much for your time.

[SIGNED BY WHOEVER IS INVOLVED]

It may be sensible to reprint a copy of the Guardian article on the back of this letter, so that our smiling faces can reassure them that this will be a thoroughly restrained, English and therefore effective event.

See my book Cancelled! on the Southern Railways disaster, now on sale for £1.99 (10p goes to Railway Benefit Fund).

Subscribe to this blog on email; send me a message with the word blogsubscribe to dcboyle@gmail.com. When you want to stop, you can email me the word unsubscribe.

Join me for a small bit of civil disobedience - with cake...

I'm certainly not a conspiracy theorist. Quite the reverse in fact. But the bizarre way that the poor put-upon passengers are being pressured into taking sides in the rail dispute - for the management or for the unions, as if that was the only issue - might just make me one.

Perhaps most worrying of all has been the way that the two women, arts journalists, who run the Association of British Commuters are being vilified in the media. 

The strange thing is that I have huge admiration for Andrew Gilligan, and I hope he's realised that he got it wrong this time. He's taken the side of passengers before and I'm sure he will again.

We are in short being forced to take sides in the traditional oh-so-British management-versus-labour battle – when the slow collapse of Southern Rail is mainly to do with incompetent franchising from the Department of Transport and absentee landlord behaviour from the Treasury and owners Go Ahead (as well, of course, on the usual useless industrial relations that seems so inevitable in the UK).

How do we keep up the voice of passengers in this great squeeze? The answer is to learn from Gandhi. Which is why I’m going to demonstrate a little light civil disobedience on Wednesday at 5.45pm at the barrier at Brighton Station (assuming they don’t cancel my train).

In short, as a regular user of GTR services (Southern, Thameslink etc), I have now reached the end of my tether. I’m not any more prepared to submit my ticket (which I will buy) to the company for inspection, when they have manifestly failed to provide me with an adequate or reliable service, now for eight months.

So do join me. I hope it will be fun. We will politely, demand to see the manager to open the gates for us – on the grounds that they are not keeping to their side of the contract. We will also have cake to celebrate our revival of the Blitz spirit in the face of such official indifference.

If the gates are open already, we will claim victory and try again another day. I’ve been blogging about this crisis – and the industrial dispute which is also going on – since June now. And I’ve come to the conclusion that this is a matter of self-respect. If we can be pushed around like this on this relatively small matter – taking our money, increasing fares, giving us an increasingly useless service – then what else will they do to us? 

It is time to draw a line in the sand for reasonable people. Please come along on Wednesday and help me draw it! And please use the hashtag #passengerstrike 

See my book Cancelled! on the Southern Railways disaster, now on sale for £1.99 (10p goes to Railway Benefit Fund).

Subscribe to this blog on email; send me a message with the word blogsubscribe to dcboyle@gmail.com. When you want to stop, you can email me the word unsubscribe

How Gandhi could win this for rail passengers: a proposition

A few days after Christmas, I climbed with my family up to the old motte and bailey castle that
crowns Truleigh Hill on the South Downs. On the one side you can see the English Channel; to the north, there is Sussex laid out before you.

But what was that black scar in the sky going from south to north, I asked myself? Then I realised. It was the M23, the motorway route from Brighton to London. A great, oily streak across the clear air.

I had a slightly sanctimonious email just before Christmas, asking me why I have spent so much time blogging about unimportant issues like Southern Rail when there are people actually dying in Syria. This is of course quite true, and it did bother me - but the black cloud across Sussex made me think again.

It is true that Southern Rail are not actually bombing anyone. It isn't systematically murdering families. But the crisis is causing the breakdown of the systems we use to make getting from place to place bearable and as little polluting as possible. Because Southern has a dysfunctional contract, and because their owners Go Ahead do nothing to fulfil their duties beyond it, the air we breathe becomes as intolerable as the journeys we make.

But there is another reason I am concerned about it - though not to the exclusion of everything else, as I hope to show later in the year - and you only have to see the results of the Association of British Commuters passenger survey to get a hint of it.

I find it both extraordinary and disturbing that we put up with what we do. We pay through the nose to travel with Southern, and more than that before 9.30am, though they have not been capable of getting us there reliably now since April. They may bundle us on and off trains. They may abandon us in the middle of the night at a station miles from home. They may let us miss meetings, school pickups, flights, interviews and dates - and our families - with complete impunity. Yet we still obediently pay up and hand over our tickets.

Maybe that doesn't matter in itself. It isn't Syria, after all - but if they can do that to us, what else might they do?

We all have our lists, but mine would include closing the post office services vital for our local economies and promised us when they closed the bank branches. Or undermining our attempts to be more financially independent by taxing solar panel (both of these now seem to be happening). Or a range of other ways in which ministers peddle untruths or take us for granted or simply wash their hands of us, during the tortuous Brexit negotiations to come.

And all because they find they can mess us around on the trains and we stay obediently pliable.

So I've been asking myself what I think is a pretty important question. What would Gandhi do?

And you only have to articulate this for the answer to be obvious. Gandhi would refuse to show his ticket. He wouldn't bother to have a fight with a guard about it. He would get together with 200 or so others and refuse to show tickets - not at any of the small stations where the gates are usually left open these days - but at Brighton.

He would buy a ticket - this is civil disobedience not illegality - but he would refuse to show it, along with everyone else, at the gates at Brighton Station at 6pm and clog the arteries until they open the gates and let him through. He would film the event, knowing the embarrassment it would cause in either eventuality - either opening or keeping the gates closed would cause political pressure to mount.

By doing this he would shift the narrative away from the one the government wants - that this is just about industrial action - and put the attention right back where it belongs: on the plight of the passengers these last eight months or so, on the incompetence of the train company, the failures of its owners and the duplicity of the Department of Transport, where it belongs. It would give us passengers back some dignity again.

I had felt it was unfair to put the guards under this kind of pressure - they are courageous people who have stuck by the passengers during the worst chaos in the summer. But the industrial action has made me think again about this. Let's see which side the unions are actually on, when we ask them to open the gates.

Yes, I understand that the people manning the gates at Brighton are not members either of Aslef or the RMT, though some of them will be. They are mainly agency staff and security guards. But the managers will soon be on the scene if enough passengers are explaining that they can't show their tickets because the operator has failed to fulfil the contract between them - and if enough can spend a few hours putting pressure on outside the gates by persuading others to do the same.

I would be up for that. It seems unlikely that Southern will lose their nerve like the British in India and start arresting us - we should be so lucky - but the longer they hold out, the more uncomfortable it is for them and the more this tactic will work. It works whether they open the gates or keep them closed.

I'd like to start the ball rolling by getting together with anyone who wants to talk about this at the end of Platform 4 on Wed 11 Jan. I will be on the Thameslink that arrives at 1743 in Brighton (the last train of the day). It is a full strike day so there may be nobody around - in which case I will go off and have a drink and try again another day.

But the beauty of this tactic is that anybody can lead it. They can hand out letters in the Brighton-bound train explaining that they will be refusing to show tickets at the barriers and asking others to join them for an hour or so. If they do so, just a few guidelines:

DO be polite and peaceful: that's how we win.

DON'T browbeat the security staff - ask for the manager and demand to be let through. There's no point in getting through by accident.

DO film the conversations and post them on social media.

DON'T browbeat other commuters. Lots of people will be busy and that's fair enough.

DON'T take sides - as far as this action is concerned, the government, management, owners and unions are all in it together, even if they are bound by common bonds of frustration and hate.

DO be careful. We will not be breaking any laws, except for the railway byelaw which says we have to show our tickets on demand. It makes sense therefore not to do this alone.

DO bring a thermos. It's got to be fun!

I suggest that the hashtag #passengerstrike. I also hope the process can drag a little self-esteem back from the jaws of Southern Rail. Goodness knows, we need it.

See my book Cancelled! on the Southern Railways disaster, now on sale for £1.99 (10p goes to Railway Benefit Fund).

Subscribe to this blog on email; send me a message with the word blogsubscribe to dcboyle@gmail.com. When you want to stop, you can email me the word unsubscribe