Latest news with #fareDodging
The Independent
16 hours ago
- General
- The Independent
Susanna Reid clashes with Robert Jenrick over fare dodgers video: ‘It's not about you'
Good Morning Britain presenter Susanna Reid clashed with Robert Jenrick over a video of himself confronting alleged fare dodgers on the London Underground. The shadow justice secretary visited Stratford station last week, where he filmed several alleged fare dodgers appearing to break the law. In one scene he appears to confront a man, who claimed he had a knife on him. The GMB host confronted Mr Jenrick about his video during Monday's show (2 June), telling him: 'You made it all about you, the video was literally all about you"
Daily Mail
a day ago
- General
- Daily Mail
Moment Robert Jenrick asks fare dodger if he is carrying a KNIFE as he confronts brazen passengers who jump Tube barriers
This is the moment Robert Jenrick confronted fare dodgers on the London Underground, asking if one of them was carrying a knife. The shadow justice secretary shared footage of himself approaching three men at Stratford station in an attempt to show the extent of lawbreaking in the capital. He can be heard asking one of them if they have a knife on them - as he questions why they think it is alright not to pay. Mr Jenrick, who previously ran for leader of the Conservative Party, said: 'Do you want to go back and pay like everybody else?' He then said: 'But everyone else has to pay.' One of the alleged fare dodgers, who was wearing a black coat and baseball cap, told him to 'f*** off'. The shadow cabinet member then replies: 'You can say f*** off as much as you want.' Towards the end of the clip, Mr Jenrick can be heard asking one of the men: 'You what, you're carrying a knife, did you say?' As well as fare dodging, the Tory politician also vowed to go after 'weird Turkish barber shops', as well as bike theft, shoplifting and drug use in town centres. In a piece to camera outside the east London station, he said these things were 'chipping away at society' - as he called on the authorities to go after lawbreakers. Mr Jenrick, whose role as shadow justice secretary does not include tackling crime, claimed London mayor Sadiq Khan is 'driving a proud city into the ground'. He captioned the video on X:' Lawbreaking is out of control. He's [Mr Khan] not acting. So, I did.' Speaking to Times Radio after he posted the clip, Mr Jenrick rejected the suggestion his vigilante fare dodger campaign was irresponsible. He said: 'We do all have a role in society to call people out. 'Everyone has to make their own decisions... I do think that we all have a role in society to call people out. 'If you see somebody chucking litter on the floor, it's not somebody else's problem. 'Frankly, it's not just the police who should step up.' Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch also welcomed Mr Jenrick's actions. She said: 'Rob is right. Sadiq Khan's been asleep at the wheel for 10 years and London is paying the price. Families don't feel safe. Investors are leaving. 'It's time to take back control of our city.' It comes as shocking footage showed the moment a fare dodger was told he owed more than £3,500 in unpaid ticket costs on Transport for London. The man had been using a bank card with no money on it for over a year - when he was caught by TfL investigators at Surrey Quays station in London's docklands. While the card had been accepted by the ticket reader each time, it had later resulted in a payment failure. This meant he was able to force the exit gates to open at a station without having to pay the TfL travel charge, racking up thousands of unpaid fees. The unsuspecting man was snared on his way to work, with investigators able to trace his usual journey and identify him on CCTV. After being taken in for an interview, the man claims he 'found' the card, before changing his mind and saying it was given to him by a friend. But this does little to convince the officers, as they reveal he owes TfL an eye-watering £3,573 from more than 500 journeys taken in over a year. The elaborate sting was captured in the latest episode of Channel 5 documentary 'Fare Dodgers: At War with the Law'. TfL investigator Lisa and her colleague spotted the man just as he was exiting the barriers at Surrey Quays train station. She asks the man to show her the card he used to tap out before asking where he got it. The man replies: 'No it's not mine, I found it.' 'Oh that's a whole different ball game now,' Lisa adds. She then checks the card on her own scanner, which confirms her suspicions that the card is faulty. 'You see there it's failed? So me and you need to have a conversation. So I am going to ask you in for an interview.' The fare dodger then asks: 'Is it going to take a long time? I'm working,' to which Lisa replies: 'It's going to take as long as it takes.' As she begins interviewing the man, Lisa tells him an investigation into the card shows that he had been using it illegally.
Yahoo
2 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
Sky News Presenter Compares Robert Jenrick To Hollywood Star Over Fare-Dodgers Video
A Sky News presenter compared Robert Jenrick to a Hollywood star over the video showing him tackling fare-dodgers on the London Underground. Trevor Phillips quoted a famous line delivered by Liam Neeson in the film Taken as he interviewed the shadow justice secretary this morning. In the video Jenrick posted on X last week, the former Tory leadership candidate is seen confronting several men who had forced their way through the ticket barriers on the Tube rather than paying for a ticket. He said lawbreaking was now 'out of control' in the capital, and accused London mayor Sadiq Khan of 'driving a proud city into the ground'. On Sky News this morning, Phillips told Jenrick: 'As I was watching it, the words 'I have acquired a very particular set of skills, skills that make me a nightmare for people like you' occurred in my mind. You'll know the reference, I imagine.' That is a line from the film Taken, in which Neeson plays Bryan Mills, a former government operative trying to rescue his daughter. Phillips added: 'Is this a new Robert Jenrick pitching for something – leader of the Conservative Party? Mayor of London?' Jenrick replied: 'No, I'm just trying to do my job as shadow justice secretary. 'You can wear a suit, you can be in Westminster, you can do great interviews with individuals like yourself, speeches in parliament, or you can also get out of Westminster, start talking about issues.' Phillips then interrupted him to say: 'This is Tik Tok politics though, isn't it?' But Jenrick said: 'I think you've got to listen to the public and sometimes you've got to shame the authorities into taking action. 'I've done this about litter in Birmingham, I've done it about tradesmen having their vans broken into and their tools nicked. I think this is an important way of raising issues.' "This is TikTok politics, isn't it?", Sky's @TrevorPTweets asks Shadow Justice Secretary @RobertJenrick after a video of the MP confronting 'fare dodgers' went viral this week. Read more: — Sky News (@SkyNews) June 1, 2025 Jenrick was criticised for his actions by by Maryam Eslamdoust, general secretary of the TSSA union, which represents Tube staff. She said: 'We've long said that fare evasion should be tackled through proper investment in staffing and enforcement and not by MPs playing hero on the commute. 'What we need is a fully funded British Transport Police, more London Underground revenue control teams, and a serious plan to tackle the causes of fare evasion. What we don't need are performative interventions.' Robert Jenrick Accused Of 'Playing Hero' By Tackling Fare-Dodgers On The Tube Robert Jenrick Suggests Nigel Farage Is On Drugs For Wanting To Scrap Two-Child Benefit Cap Wilfred Frost Fact-Checks Robert Jenrick In Painful On-Air Clash Over Tories' Winter Fuel Plan
The Guardian
3 days ago
- Business
- The Guardian
It's easy to dismiss Robert Jenrick's fare-dodging stunt. But he understands something Keir Starmer doesn't
There is no shortage of reasons to dislike and dismiss Robert Jenrick. He is, after all, the former immigration minister who ordered that a centre for unaccompanied child asylum-seekers paint over its murals of cartoon characters, lest the child refugees got the wrong idea and thought they were being welcomed and had at last reached a place of safety. We certainly wouldn't want to take lectures on law-breaking from Jenrick, given that the former housing secretary acted unlawfully in rushing through approval for a development by the Conservative donor Richard Desmond, thereby saving the onetime porn publisher more than £40m. Nor would he be our go-to guy on matters of ripping off the public, not after it was revealed in 2020 that he claimed £100,000 in expenses for a third home. To say nothing of his service in a Boris Johnson administration that happily funnelled at least £1bn of taxpayers' money to assorted chancers lucky enough to have a friend in government, thereby securing for themselves a place in the VIP lane when it came to bidding for lucrative contracts making personal protective equipment or PPE. All of that makes it tempting to wave aside Jenrick's latest stunt, a video of himself challenging fare dodgers at a London Underground station, calling them 'mate' and demanding that they go back and pay for their journey. The transparency of his motive only strengthens that impulse. He wants Kemi Badenoch's job: we know that, because he tried to get it last time, when she defeated him. What's more, his pitch is that he will be the Tory leader who outflanks Reform UK on the right, nullifying that party's threat by offering voters the same brew of nationalist populism they can get from Nigel Farage. That's why he speaks so often, and so unbendingly, on immigration and why he includes an unexpected item in the list of menaces with which he closes the fare-dodging video: 'It's the same with bike theft, phone theft, tool theft, shoplifting, drugs in town centres, weird Turkish barber shops. It's all chipping away at society.' Weird Turkish barber shops. It leaps out, because it's the only thing in that list that isn't a crime. Ah, comes the response, but many of those places are suspected fronts for criminal activity, specifically money laundering. OK, but the same suspicion hovers over the 'American candy' stores that are similarly proliferating on the high street; why didn't Jenrick mention them? Could it be that 'American' doesn't quite have the same bite as 'Turkish'? Jenrick is an extremely online politician, one who will be familiar with the 'Yookay' meme, which suggests a Britain gone to the dogs: shabby, scuzzy, lawless and threatening – and that often likes to illustrate this descent into antisocial malaise with pictures of young Black and brown men. The 'Turkish' reference fits that narrative quite nicely. So there are good reasons for anti-racists and progressives to dismiss Jenrick and this latest bit of agitprop, seeing it as a cynical play either for Badenoch's job or, perhaps, Sadiq Khan's, given that the explicit target of the video is the London mayor. And yet, it would be unwise to do that too hastily. There is a lesson here for liberals, the Labour government and all those who want to see nationalist populism defeated. Because Jenrick is on to something here. Toxic messenger though he might be, his message will land. Put simply, people despise, with vehemence, what would officially be classified as petty crime and antisocial behaviour. Listen to those who have agreed with Jenrick on this latest point, including mothers speaking of pushing toddlers in buggies, only to be shoved aside by fare-dodgers seizing on the chance to slip through an open gate. But it goes deeper than physical intimidation. The resentment resides in the sense of unfairness: you paid, so why shouldn't they? You put out all your bins, so why should someone else get away with dumping rubbish on the street? The anger this generates is not solely about what they've not done, but about what you have done. Crime or antisocial conduct of this kind makes you feel as if you've been a mug, a sucker, for obeying the rules. That sentiment corrodes the rule of law and is politically poisonous, as Jenrick should know. He is out of government partly because of it. The anger at Johnson originated in his breaking of lockdown rules, but the depth of that anger was because he had, in the process, made so many feel foolish for having kept them. It is that fury which Jenrick is tapping into. 'But everyone else has to pay,' he says to one fare dodger, and it's the heart of the matter. Some of the hostile responses Jenrick has generated have upbraided him for making so much about a few quid here or there, when much greater larcenies are being committed. It's quite true that it would take many decades of committed barrier-jumping by today's fare-dodgers to steal a sum close to the £15.3bn fortune taken from taxpayers' pockets in Covid contracts deemed to 'carry a high risk of corruption'. But that's to skip past human psychology. We react to the crime we can see in front of us with more intensity than to one distant and abstract. Besides, there is at least a criminological argument, popularised as 'broken windows theory', to the view that if you deal swiftly with small crimes, you deter criminals from committing larger ones. The narrow lesson Keir Starmer might take from this is that he needs to act soon on fare evasion and the like. The broader, more pertinent one would be about politics itself. Sometimes politicians are at their most effective when they don't pass a law or spend money, but simply give voice to voters' anxieties. Donald Trump does it even now, acting as a commentator on patterns and trends in US society as if he were a pundit rather than the president. Farage does it all the time; Tony Blair used to do it, even from Downing Street. The current PM's technocratic instinct is to say nothing about a problem unless he has a plan or policy to fix it. But sometimes it's effective just to make an argument from the 'bully pulpit' you have as head of government. That's what leaders, as opposed to managers, do. It's a way of signalling to voters who you are, what you believe and, most important, whose side you're on. Starmer would be wise to do it more. It might mean a nod to the right, calling, say, for the return of a sense of shame to those guilty of selfish, antisocial behaviour, or a nod to the left, publicly naming and shaming, say, the water bosses who have been similarly selfish and antisocial by taking gargantuan bonuses even as they beg for bailouts. Awkward, I admit, to have to take lessons in politics from the likes of Robert Jenrick. But this one is useful. And, best of all, Starmer didn't even have to pay for it. Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
The Sun
3 days ago
- General
- The Sun
Why I decided to confront fare-dodging yobs on the Tube – their lawbreaking is a slap in the face to hard-working Brits
I AM sick to my back teeth of seeing fare-dodgers getting away with it. For ordinary hard-working citizens travelling into work on their morning commute, the sight of tons slipping through without paying is a slap in the face. 3 3 People who do the right thing are made to look like fools for sticking to the law, while louts benefit from breaking the rules with impunity. Enough is enough. Politicians can hold debates and write letters, but sometimes you have to get your hands dirty to sort things out. Last Saturday, I went to Stratford station to shame London's useless mayor, Sadiq Khan, into action. I saw dozens of freeloaders bumping the barriers while enforcement officers stood idly by doing nothing. What is the point of them if they don't bother doing their job? It shouldn't be left to the public enforce the law. Channel 4 and the Guardian were more offended by me filming the lawbreaking than the criminality itself! They showed themselves to be apologists for law-breaking. The whole episode encapsulated broken Britain where law-breaking is rife. Graffiti is everywhere. Many of our high streets are now a mix of charity stores, vape shops, and fake American candy stores. There is a collapse of basic standards in public spaces - and parts of the establishment are in la la land. Once-proud towns and cities are having their soul ripped out of them by petty law-breakers. Unless the authorities crack down on petty law-breaking, more serious crime will follow and we will see a complete breakdown of law and order. 3
