Bill Carmichael: View of Britain's backbone from the 7.05

For the rest of the year catching the 7.05 or 8.11 CrossCountry service out of Leeds en route for Wakefield, Sheffield, Birmingham, Bristol and Plymouth usually means standing room only, and I have to wedge myself upright in a packed carriage along with dozens of other people who have all paid for the privilege of having a seat.

How the train companies get away with this is a mystery. Imagine if you booked an evening at the theatre or in a restaurant only to be told: “Sorry, we are a bit busy – you are going to have to watch the play/eat your dinner standing up.”

We seasoned commuters often exchange the same grim joke – if they tried transporting cattle like this, animal rights activists would be chaining themselves to the rails.

I sometimes think that if the rail companies were forced to give a 50 per cent discount to any passenger unable to find a seat they would soon find the necessary extra carriages – as they miraculously manage to do every year for a big horse race.

The lack of seating apart, the service isn’t all bad. It is reasonably fast, usually only slightly late and the staff are cheerful and efficient – although admittedly it is impossible for them to check tickets on the busier services as they cannot physically make their way down the packed carriages.

I often look around at my fellow commuters, peering at their phones, bashing away at laptops or staring wistfully out of the window clearly wishing they were elsewhere, and I think this is the real Britain – the true heart of the country.

These people are not Cameron’s rich cronies with their utterly worthless, bought and paid for, ‘honours’, nor the lard bucket benefits bandits watching daytime television on their 62-inch plasma screens lubricated with a four-pack of Special Brew.

These are the decent people in the middle who make Britain tick; the people who get up at some God-forsaken hour on a freezing, wet Wednesday in the middle of February to drag themselves across the country to do a job of work that won’t be finished before the children are tucked up in bed.

They are not rich, but they are all 
in work, creating the wealth on which 
the nation depends, paying ridiculous rates of tax and providing for their families with the little that is left. Without them, the country would 
simply collapse.

It is for these reasons that the current wave of militancy by the rail unions – on Southern Rail, Scot Rail, Eurostar and Virgin East Coast – hits such a chord. The real victims of the current strikes are not the hand-wringing, ineffectual government ministers nor the union bosses with their fat-cat salaries – but the ordinary put-upon passenger.

I listened to one woman on the radio who broke down in sobs over giving up her job because not once in three months had she managed to keep a promise to her children to be home in time to read them a bedtime story despite leaving work in plenty of time.

And such misery is for what? The current Southern Rail dispute is over who should press the button to close the train doors – the driver or the guard.

How completely pathetic. On plenty of trains around the world drivers operate the train doors perfectly safely. Another ‘joke’ we commuters often exchange is that the train drivers are more handsomely paid than most of their passengers – including those in first class. Surely it cannot be beyond their abilities to press a button?

If the political elites really want to understand this country, they could do worse than to escape from the Westminster bubble for a day and
get on an early morning bus or train in any of our towns and cities, and
actually speak to the people they find there.

Perhaps if more had done this in the past, the Brexit vote would not have come as such an earth-shattering shock to them.

And if they did – and shaped their policies according to the concerns and aspirations of the man or woman
on the packed 7.05 – I reckon they
would win an election by an absolute landslide.