Rail fares in England will be frozen – but it could have been done before. Here’s why it wasn’t
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Rail fares in England will be frozen in January, for the first time in 30 years – but the big question is: why didn’t the government do it before?
If you think the answer has anything to do with rail re-nationalisation – you’re mistaken!
Here’s the BBC:
“Rail fares in England are to be frozen next year for the first time in 30 years, the government has announced.
“The freeze until March 2027 will apply to regulated fares, which includes season tickets and off-peak returns.
“The most recent fare rise, in March 2025, was 4.6%. Rail fares traditionally have gone up in January, based on the July rate of the retail price index (RPI) + 1% – although this formula has not always been followed. Since 2021, the annual increase has come in March instead of January.
“About 45% of rail fares are regulated by the government in England, Wales and Scotland – but the freeze only relates to travel in England. The announcement also only applies to services run by England-based train operating companies.
“The transport secretary said it was part of “wider plans to rebuild Great British Railways”.
“Great British Railways is a public body which is in the process of being set up, and is part of the government’s plans to bring parts of the railway system into public ownership.”
The part about Great British Railways is, in fact, irrelevant. It has nothing to do with the reason the government can freeze rail fares.
Would you like to know the real reason it can?
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Pollster offers four choices to replace Starmer – but NONE of them have Labour values
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A new opinion poll has suggested four possible replacements for Keir Starmer as leader of the Labour Party – but there’s one big problem: none of them offer any hope of returning to the values that made the party great – and that it has abandoned.
Here’s The Guardian:
“Andy Burnham, Ed Miliband, Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting would all win a head-to-head leadership contest against Keir Starmer, according to a poll of Labour members.
“Research conducted by Survation for LabourList found that Burnham and Rayner would defeat the prime minister by considerable margins, while Streeting and Miliband would have a slight advantage but within the margin of error.
“The poll also found 54% of members said there should be a new Labour leader in place before the next general election. And 41% of those who backed Starmer for the leadership in 2020 said a new leader should be in place, with 40% wanting him to stay.”
There’s one simple fault in the poll, and the philosophy behind it: it does not question whether any of the proposed replacements would actually represent the politics of most Labour Party members.
To read the rest, head over to The Whip Line.
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Are innocent people paying the price because Palestine Action’s ban is based on secrets?
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Even people inside the Home Office are worried the government has seriously overreached with its ban on Palestine Action.
According to The Guardian, a member of the Home Office’s own homeland security group has warned that proscribing the direct-action network is already generating confusion, wrongful referrals and the risk of innocent people being criminalised simply for engaging in Palestine advocacy.
This official works closely with Prevent – the anti-terrorism scheme that has become notorious for hauling in schoolchildren for drawing pictures, questioning university students over reading lists, and generally encouraging overreaction wherever frontline workers fear being blamed for not reporting something.
Now, because supporting Palestine Action is suddenly a terrorism offence, teachers, NHS staff, local authorities and counter-terrorism officers are reportedly unsure whether they must refer people for simply voicing views about Palestine – even if they have nothing to do with the proscribed group.
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The warning could hardly be sharper: Prevent, which is already under what the official calls “unprecedented” pressure after the Southport attacks, risks being “overwhelmed”. And that is before the legal challenge to the ban has even been heard.
The most troubling aspect of all this is the one The Guardian’s report only touches indirectly: the government has justified the proscription of Palestine Action using secret evidence.
Ministers have said they relied on intelligence they cannot disclose, meaning the public – and even many Parliamentarians – have no way of assessing whether the ban is proportionate, necessary or even credible.
That is the core democratic deficit. If the government can criminalise an entire protest movement on the basis of information that cannot be examined, challenged or even understood, then nobody outside Whitehall has any reason to believe the ban is legitimate.
It becomes a matter of trust – and trust is precisely what the Home Office official says has already been damaged.
Once a group is proscribed, mere support becomes a terrorism offence.
Yet the state is refusing to show the evidence that turned those actions into crimes.
That is why this Homeland Security Group official’s concern matters so much: Prevent referrals, wrongful arrests, and the criminalisation of people engaged in general Palestine advocacy all stem from a decision whose justification is hidden from the public.
Combine those factors and the picture becomes even more alarming. You have:
- a ban based on undisclosed intelligence;
- frontline confusion about what is lawful;
- rising Prevent referrals and strained resources;
- young people at risk of being treated as terrorism suspects for comments they may not realise now carry criminal weight; and
- a counter-terrorism framework losing credibility even among those who operate it.
In short: secret evidence has allowed the government to create a new category of “terrorist” overnight, and even its own officials are warning that the consequences are spiralling beyond control.
It fits the wider pattern. David Anderson KC, the independent Prevent reviewer, told the Lords that the government’s move means anyone “young and foolish enough” to say Palestine Action “has its heart in the right place” could be prosecuted as a terrorist.
That is an extraordinary threshold – effectively criminalising political opinion, not conduct. The Thought Police are no longer a science fiction concept – they have arrived in force.
The Home Office, of course, responded with the familiar line that supporting Palestine is lawful. But the warning from inside its own walls is that this distinction is already being lost in practice, and young people in particular could be dragged into counter-terrorism systems without understanding that an overnight change in the law has turned a slogan, a share or a careless comment into an imprisonable offence.
And the sting in the tail: according to the official, the ban has damaged trust in government and in Prevent itself, making vital counter-terrorism work harder, not easier.
In other words, this is exactly what critics predicted: by trying to crush a disruptive protest group, ministers may have compromised their own security apparatus, muddied the legal landscape, and created yet another pathway for innocent people to be watched, reported or criminalised.
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Starmer has screwed up. Let’s put him on probation
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Keir Starmer has spent the first 16 months of his Parliament treading water (badly) and now wants us to give him another 44 months and a general election to put it right. I say no.
But I’m not saying he should be jettisoned just yet, either.
Let’s put him on probation.
Look at it this way: Starmer asked to be judged at the next general election, and that’s a reasonable democratic position — but the evidence in the Institute for Government’s (IfG) performance tracker report – and recent polling – means he should earn that mandate by demonstrating concrete, measurable delivery in a much shorter window.
To read the rest, head over to The Whip Line.
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Why were voters hoodwinked into supporting Boris Johnson – the wrong choice of prime minister.
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How was Boris Johnson allowed to be the most powerful man in the UK when he had no idea how to do the job?
That’s the big question at the heart of last week’s report by the Covid Inquiry, which explicitly stated that his indecision, incompetence and other failures massively increased the death toll of the pandemic that hit the UK in 2020, months after he was voted into office.
Let’s answer it.
What the report exposes — without stating it outright — is a deeper failure of the United Kingdom’s political system.
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The UK’s system allowed an unfit leader to be sold as “the best option”
Boris Johnson did not become prime minister by accident.
He was selected by a tiny fraction of the electorate — Conservative Party members — then packaged and sold to the public by an overwhelmingly sympathetic right-wing press as the only viable choice in 2019.
Fitness for office barely featured. Scrutiny of his temperament, competence, and judgement was kept to the margins.
The democratic structures that should have filtered out an unfit leader instead elevated one.
The 2019 general election produced a manufactured consensus that Johnson was the only plausible prime minister. That consensus rested on:
- A highly centralised party system, where the party leader is effectively chosen by a narrow selectorate, then presented to the public as a fait accompli.
- A media ecosystem dominated by a handful of right-wing outlets that acted less as watchdogs and more as brand managers for Johnson.
- A campaign that reduced national politics to a slogan, enabling a shallow, personality-driven contest.
The result was that fitness for office barely featured — and certainly not the kind of cognitive incompetence exposed in the Covid Inquiry.
The slogan: The Tory message on Brexit was brutally simple — and Labour’s was muddied
“Get Brexit Done” was a reductive, misleading and dishonest slogan – but those three words turned the 2019 general election into a landslide for Johnson. It was devastatingly effective because it:
- Promised closure to a weary electorate
- Framed Johnson as a man who would “cut through” obstacles
- Cast all opposition as obstructionist or indecisive
Meanwhile, Labour’s position became tortured:
- Keir Starmer, as Shadow Brexit Secretary, pushed for a second referendum when much of Labour’s base simply wanted the party to honour the original result with safeguards.
- That muddied the message and enabled the Tory narrative that Labour were “blocking the will of the people”.
This handed Johnson an artificial aura of clarity and decisiveness — qualities the Inquiry shows he did not actually possess.
Establishment hostility to Jeremy Corbyn distorted the electoral field
Then-Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn — who, in hindsight, would probably have been a far more responsible and scientifically cautious pandemic prime minister — was subjected to the most sustained campaign of hostility in modern UK political memory.
There is no way to discuss 2019 honestly without acknowledging that:
- Then-Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn faced the most sustained, coordinated negative press campaign in modern UK political history
- Institutions hostile to his economic agenda framed him as uniquely dangerous
- Smears, misrepresentations and personal attacks overwhelmed substantive debate
That campaign shaped public perception far more than the content of either party’s manifesto.
This meant that, when voters looked for stability or seriousness, the media had pre-emptively disqualified the candidate who in hindsight would likely have responded to the pandemic:
- earlier
- more cautiously
- with greater respect for scientific advice
- with stronger social protections
- and with more moral seriousness
Nobody needs to claim Corbyn would have been perfect — but we should recognise that his political instincts aligned far more closely with the responses taken by the countries that handled Covid competently.
By the time voters entered polling booths, the Establishment had already determined who was “credible” — and who must never be allowed near Downing Street.
The consequences are now counted in lives.
Intellectual unfitness at the top
The Inquiry’s evidence leaves little room for euphemism: Johnson lacked the intelligence, comprehension skills, and cognitive steadiness required for crisis leadership.
He could not grasp exponential growth.
He could not retain information he had been given.
He could not hold to a course of action.
He could not appreciate the consequences of delay until they were playing out on hospital wards.
The United Kingdom entered its worst peacetime national emergency in a century with a prime minister who simply was not intellectually equipped for the job.
That was a political failure long before it was a personal one.
The deeper question
We are led to ask: What kind of political culture produces a situation where the individual least suited to managing a pandemic was packaged as the safest pair of hands?
The Inquiry’s report is not just a record of past catastrophe; it is a warning.
Unless the United Kingdom confronts the political culture that allowed chaos, incompetence and scientific illiteracy to masquerade as leadership, the next emergency will play out the same way.
A system that rewards slogans over substance, personality over competence, and media manipulation over public service will keep producing the wrong leaders — and the public will keep paying the price.
Look at the current situation, in which Labour leader Keir Starmer – who had four years to prepare a plan for government and used it purging his own party of its socialist backbone instead – is trying to justify 16 months of incompetence with pleas that we should give him another 44, and a general election, before judging him.
That is the real scandal at the heart of the Covid Inquiry.
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