Latest news with #faredodging
The Sun
4 days ago
- General
- The Sun
Robert Jenrick says he chose to ‘get his hands dirty' and collar fare-dodgers after watching so many get away with it
ROBERT Jenrick collared fare-dodgers after watching so many get away with it, he says. The Shadow Justice Secretary tackled cheats at an East London Tube station, telling The Sun: 'Sometimes you have to get your hands dirty.' 2 Mr Jenrick said he saw 'dozens of freeloaders' slip through at Stratford in an hour. He is told to 'f*** off' as he pursues them in footage seen more than 12 million times. He blasts station staff for failing to intervene, and asks: 'What is the point of them if they don't bother doing their job? 'It shouldn't be left to the public to enforce the law.' In one case, he says to a basketball-hat wearing yob: 'You what?You're carrying a knife?' Mr Jenrick, MP for Newark, Notts, was criticised by some critics for not getting Transport for London permission to film in the station. He lost out to Kemi Badenoch in last year's Tory leadership race but is tipped to succeed her should she be forced out. He is understood to be planning more videos. I'll take Nigel Farage DOWN, blasts Robert Jenrick - he's about to get the oxygen sucked out of him 2
The Independent
5 days ago
- General
- The Independent
I'm glad Robert Jenrick has joined my one-woman battle against fare-dodgers
A busy week for Robert Jenrick, who has been challenging fare evaders on the trains and Tubes this week, asking people why they appeared to have neglected to pay for their journey. I'm not surprised that the video clip of him confronting people who appeared to have forced their way through ticket barriers has been viewed more than 10m times. With his stunt – 'You're on camera, mate, you're bang to rights' – he's hit a nerve. He seemed to be in Stratford, east London, on the same day as I was; me visiting the V&A's new Storehouse museum, the shadow secretary of state for justice to discover why fare-dodging is costing Transport for London £130 million a year. If I'd known he was going to be going full vigilante, I'd have combined my visit to London's newest cultural jewel with a chance to join him in collaring the barrier-hoppers to ask why they were happy contributing to the recent 4.6 per cent rise in Tube fares. Because, like Jenrick, I don't mind calling out bad behaviour when I see it. On too many journeys on public transport, I see people – ok, men, it's always men – evading fares, barging through the barriers, or telling the bus driver that they don't have any money and are 'only going two stops'. When they're told to get off and they grudgingly open their Apple Pay, it feels like a minor victory for the whole of society. Last year, I was exiting the Tube at Victoria and felt someone press up behind me as I passed through the gate. They'd clearly done this so they didn't have to pay, and as we both cleared the gate, I asked them why they thought they were above paying for a ticket. The middle-aged man just said 'Don't want to', and walked off. When I told the gate staff what had happened, they said they weren't allowed to take any action and to leave any cases like this to revenue enforcement staff. But 'not my problem' seems to be the sum of it. Of course, I understand the risk of taking on people like this – in Jenrick's video, one evader claimed to be carrying a knife. But why do other passengers never think to politely address the people who are making their journeys more expensive? I've talked to people on buses who've evaded fares and reminded them that all the other passengers had paid, so why should they get a free ride? The response is either nothing, or an expletive. Frankly, I'm fed up with the sense of entitlement as well as the lack of action from officialdom. But I'm also furious that it falls to a 59-year-old woman to take on men who are breaking the law. I know I'm not the only woman who does this. I'm also not averse to asking people 'do they mind not listening to that without headphones?'. But please don't call us 'Karens'. We do it not to make people's lives a misery or for a sense of moral superiority, but because these fare-evaders don't seem to face much of a deterrent on any level. In the incidents I've witnessed on the railways, there isn't even a verbal rebuke from staff when passengers push through the gates, just a shrugging of the shoulders. Each train on the new Elizabeth Line, which cost almost £20bn to build, can carry 1,500 passengers – more in the rush hour crush, or after delays to the inexplicably unreliable service. By my calculations, that means, on average, eight people in your carriage won't have paid. Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, says TfL is increasing its teams of investigators and investing in new technology to stamp out fraud: the wide-access gates at every station, which open more slowly and so are a prime target for tail-gaters, could be made more difficult to barge through. Live facial recognition cameras powered by artificial intelligence would revolutionise the ability to detect and catch criminals. All of this can't come soon enough. On my Tube journey home from Stratford, I spotted half a dozen TfL revenue officers around an exit gate checking to see who had paid and questioning those who hadn't. I was pleased to see this; it was safety in numbers for the team, but also a very visible sign that you can't just push your way through because you don't fancy paying. Perhaps if there were a few more subtle and consistent reminders on public transport, not just the occasional swarm of blue-uniformed officers, it could make evaders think twice. But at the moment, it's just middle-aged women and the odd shadow secretary of state.
Telegraph
5 days ago
- General
- Telegraph
The Left has fallen right into Jenrick's trap on fare-dodging
Robert Jenrick knows how to grab headlines. More importantly, he knows exactly how to lead his critics down a blind alley from which they cannot escape. Yesterday the shadow justice secretary released a video of himself in the London Underground confronting those who had avoided paying their fare. The political point was hardly subtle: why should the rest of us pay for those who can't be bothered paying their way? Just as he must have hoped would happen, his vigilantism sparked a massive debate on social media, with users dividing along the traditional Right and Left lines: Jenrick was either a hero who was unafraid to tackle lawlessness on behalf of the majority, or a cynical villain who was at least in part responsible, while a government minister, for the reduction in police and Underground staff who might otherwise have been available to tackle the fare-dodgers themselves. It all fell so neatly into place for Jenrick. The Left really cannot help itself, and he must have known this before he embarked on his publicity stunt. Channel 4 News spoke for much of progressive Britain who felt offended by his initiative: having watched the footage, they decided that the main news story was not that a worrying level of passengers were skipping ticket checks (nearly one in every 25 passengers, according to Jenrick) but that the Tory MP didn't have Transport for London's permission to film there at all. Twitter users with more time on their hands than I have since pointed out that TfL rules seem only to apply to commercial filming, which obviously didn't include Jenrick's exercise. But his point was made: confronted with systematic and expensive fare-dodging, the Left would rather ignore the problem if it's identified by someone whose politics they disagree with. Let us be clear: Jenrick was offering no actual solutions to the problem. This was an exercise in populism that Nigel Farage himself might have envied, and it is straight out of the Reform playbook to provoke voters' anger without explaining how they would fix the issue other than a few superficial slogans. Nevertheless, it was a PR triumph for Jenrick. The tidal wave of indignation that followed the posting of his video could hardly have suited his purposes better. Here he was, standing up for hard-pressed, law-abiding Londoners while eight 'officers' (it was not clear if this was a reference to British Transport Police officers or Underground staff) stood nearby. 'It's also just annoying,' says Jenrick to the camera, 'watching so many people break the law and get away with it…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. The state needs to reassert itself and go after law-breakers.' The reference to 'weird Turkish barber shops' was also ingenious: most people share Jenrick's suspicion about the motivation behind their recent proliferation in high streets across the country, but it is exactly the kind of accusation that makes the red mist descend in the eyes and brains of many on the Left who would rather not bring foreigners into it. At root, there is a fundamental and more complex policy issue which a minute-long video on Twitter can hardly be expected to analyse – the differing approaches to crime and its causes by the Right and the Left. Judging from many of the responses to Jenrick's original Tweet, there are very few Labour supporters who took to heart Tony Blair's view that the party should be 'tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime', preferring to emphasise the latter and completely ignore the former. Fare-dodging is caused, it seems, either by poverty or by the state not devoting enough resources to prevent the rest of us from behaving badly. Meanwhile, the Right, as represented by Jenrick, believes it's all about personal responsibility and personal choices. It is not difficult to see whose side most voters will take in that debate. Labour and the Left in general should never have fallen into Jenrick's trap. Just as Blair and Jack Straw caused outrage for a few on the Left in the 1990s by criticising 'aggressive' beggars and squeegee merchants, yet won the support of a majority of voters who were fed up with the practice and who felt, until then, unable to complain about it, so Jenrick is empowering others to object to a pretty straightforward injustice that is pushing up prices for the law-abiding majority. Cynical? Undoubtedly. Opportunistic? Without question. Effective? Certainly.
