Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn and Emily Thornberry hit train stations to protest against ‘staggering’ fare hikes crippling commuters
Fares are up on average by 2.3% as commuters head back to work today - as new research shows it's up to six times more than fares in Europe
JEREMY Corbyn has joined furious commuters in protesting against "staggering" rip off train fare increases today in London.
He joined Labour's Shadow Transport Secretary Andy McDonald and Shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry in a wave of protests at train stations across the UK in response to the 2.3% increase that came in yesterday.
As commuters returned to work today after the Christmas break, demonstrations were held at more than 100 stations from Manchester Piccadilly to Glasgow, in two days of action organised by campaign groups Action for Rail, We Own It and Bring Back British Rail.
Mr McDonald and Ms Thornberry joined protesters at Kings Cross station this morning.
The hikes mean that some travellers will be paying more than £2,000 more for their season tickets than they were in in 2010.
Fares vary between different train operators, but users of Virgin Trains East Coast are among the worst hit with an eye-watering rise of 4.9 per cent on their line.
The rises come despite the latest Consumer Price Index inflation figure of just 1%. The Government uses July's Retail Prices Index measure of inflation to calculate the increases - that was still just 1.9%.
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Commuters are paying up to 14% of their salary on train fares, but elsewhere in Europe travellers pay between two and four per cent.
said many commuters were facing a "financial headache from yet another increase in fares".
He said that "privatised rail franchises have become a licence to print money - your money."
"You only have to look at Southern Trains to see how privatisation doesn't work.
"We've pledged to take the trains back into public ownership when the franchises lapse. We pay for it, so let's own it and run it together," he added.
UK train fare increases since 2010
Brit commuters have faces train fare increases of up to £2,200 since 2010, shocking statistics reveal
- Birmingham to London (Virgin) – up £2,172, from £8,028 (2010) to £10,200 (2017).
- Coventry to London Euston (Virgin) – up £1,920, from £7,096 to £9,016.
- Swindon to London – up £1,796, from £6,640 to £8,436.
- Stoke-on-Trent to Milton Keynes Central – up £1,748, from £5,320 to £7,068.
- Dover Priory to London – up £1,672, from £4,648 to £6,320.
Mr McDonald said today: "There is another way of doing this. We don't have to have a system that just is predicated from extracting value out of passengers all the time.
"It's about time they were put first, ahead of profits."
He said the price increases were ";staggering" and showed that ministers were pursuing an "ideological" agenda.
"The truth is that our heavily fragmented railways mean that it takes years longer and costs much more than it should to deliver basic improvements.
"The railways need reforms that could be implemented if public ownership was extended to passenger services, but Ministers are persisting with a failed model for purely ideological reasons."
But Tory MP Tim Loughton hit back at Labour, and accused them of "raging against capitalism".
The representative for East Worthing and Shoreham wrote on Twitter this morning: ";Perhaps Labour MPs could really help commuters by persuading their RMT and ASLEF union donors to suspend strikes and negotiate reasonably."