Poll: fare hikes will hit Coalition seats in South
Polling shows that the expected rise in train fares could lose the Coalition vital seats in the South East.
The YouGov poll shows that 74% of commuters from London and the Home Counties who take the train 4 to 7 times a week would be less likely to support a political party that increased the current cap on train fares.
The online poll, conducted by YouGov for Campaign for Better Transport, suggests that likely rises in train fares could lead to seats changing hands at the next election as commuters express their anger at higher increases in train fares.
Yesterday Channel 4 News revealed this week’s Spending Review will see train fares rise massively.
The Campaign for Better Transport’s campaigner Alexandra Woodsworth said:
The poll shows that commuters aren’t going to take excessive fare hikes lying down. Passengers have been promised ‘fair fares’ by the Government, and now many could be paying hundreds if not thousands of pounds more for their season tickets in just a few years’ time.
We need to encourage more people to take the train, not price those who already do back into their cars.
Raising the cap on rail fare increases could lead to commuters paying up to £1,700 more for their annual season tickets by the time of the next election.
Boris talks a lot about climate change, but will he spend the money?
The Mayor’s latest draft of his Climate Change Mitigation and Energy Strategy was published last Friday without so much as a whisper in the press.
This worthy wishlist sets out how London could cut its carbon dioxide emissions by 60% by 2025, creating tens of thousands of jobs in the process.
But there are snags:
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Polls bring more bad new for Libdems
A Comres Poll yesterday found that only 57% of people who voted for the Libdems at the last election would do so again. In comparison, 92% of Labour and 92% of Tory voters would stick with their choice.
Most of that leakage is from Lib Dems to Labour: fully 24%, one in four, of May Lib Dems would now vote Labour and a further one in ten (11%) would vote Tory.
The poll also asked:
The Coalition Government understands the interests of the wealthy better than the interests of ordinary people
Agree 46%
Disagree 33%
Don’t know 21%
Half of social group C2 (50%) and DE (53%) agreed and only a quarter of each group disagreed. Furthermore, 24% of Tory voters agrees, as did 45% of current Lib Dems and a massive 52% of people who voted Lib Dem in May.
It is fair that students should pay more for their university education even though their parents’ generation didn’t
Agree 35%
Disagree 50%
Don’t know 15%
18-24 year olds were most likely to disagree (64%) and those aged 65+ most likely to agree (47%). If those youngster come out to vote the Coalition will be in trouble. Two thirds of Labour voters (66%) disagreed that students should pay more, compared to 36% of Conservative voters who disagreed; 52% of Tory voters agreed.
Welfare benefit cuts will hit hardest the poorest, elderly and most vulnerable in society
Agree 56%
Disagree 28%
Don’t know 15%
The expectations of people in lower income groups are pretty pessimistic on this measure: 67% of DEs agree with it, compared to only 52% of ABs. Over half of current LD voters (56%) think the welfare cuts will hit the these groups, as do 64% of people who voted LD in May.
The loss of hundreds of thousands of public sector jobs is a price worth paying to reduce the deficit
Agree 30%
Disagree 47%
Don’t know 23%
There is a strong party divergence: 55% of Tory voters agree but only 10% of Labour voters and 30% of LDs; 49% of LDs disagree – as do 58% of people who voted LD in May
I expect that the public spending cuts to be announced next week will be fair
Agree 30%
Disagree 43%
Don’t know 26%
DEs the gloomiest of all – 22% agree with the statement compared with 53% who do not. Six in ten Conservative voters (60%) expect the cuts to be fair, while just a third of Lib Dem supports (32%) and one in ten Labour supporters (10%) agree.
Labour abandons Darling’s plan, to focus on growth, not cuts
It turns out Ed Miliband did recruit Alan Johnson as shadow Chancellor to sell his own vision of how the deficit should be dealt with.
The plans, revealed in the Observer today, show that Labour will be closer to Ed Balls’ plans than that by Alistair Darling.
In fact they go even further. There seem to be four strands:
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Coalition unveils ‘war on commuters’
Channel 4 News today found out that the Coalition’s Cuts will lead to a 30% – 40% jump in rail fares in coming years.
The huge rise would mean that for an annual season ticket, prices could rise by well over a thousand pounds.
Norman Baker, the Lib Dem transport minister, had campaigned on a Libdem manifesto promise of only 1% prices rises in excess of inflation.
Faisal Islam reports for Channel 4:
About 600 million annual train journeys have fares that are regulated by a formula set by the Government in relation to the near £2 billion subsidy it gives to the train operators.
The end result will be train fares rising by near double digit percentages in each year of the Spending Review.
Overall, Government sources are expecting these train fares to be over 30 per cent higher by 2015, and industry sources pointed towards a 40 per cent hike by 2015.
Welcome to the new War on Commuters.
Though it’s worth noting that the government wants to end the so-called ‘War on Motorists’ by continuing to subsidise them while punishing people who use public transport.
How this fits into the claim that this will be the ‘Greenest ever’ government is anyone’s guess.
And it’s still not clear why none of this was made explicit in the Conservative party manifesto before the election.
How the tuition fees report will restrict choice and make universities powerless
contribution by margin4error
It has gone largely un-noticed that Lord Browne’s report would take power from universities, reduce student choice and bar many from study.
Way down on page 33 he proposes a benchmark of UCAS points above which all students qualify for finance. The government could move the level according to its desired student numbers or budget.
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How Labour can win in the South of England (pt 2)
[The first half of this article was published yesterday]
Here are some key lessons about how to win in the South and increase support for Labour, from the people who actually managed it:
1. Good candidates - both Andrew Smith and Kelvin Hopkins were personally popular, decent, principled MPs, prepared to vote against their party when they thought it was wrong on issues from renewal of Trident to the Gurkhas.
While some MPs of all parties abused the expenses system to enrich themselves, Andrew has lived on Blackbird Leys council estate for more than thirty years, and Kelvin commutes from Luton to London daily, just like many of his constituents.
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Tories plan to restrict protesting rights further
After slamming the Labour government for years for using the law to legislate every bit of civil life, the Conservatives seem to want to do the same.
The Leader of the House of Commons, Sir George Young, is planning to introduce further legislation to restrict the rights of protesters.
The plan was revealed in an answer to David Tredinnick MP, who asked about the situation in Parliament Square:
When does my right hon. Friend expect Parliament square to be cleared of demonstrators? Is he aware that the situation is worse than it was in the summer, with 20 illegally placed tents on the pavement meaning that nobody can use the square at all? When is he going to deal with this situation?
Some of us did predict that it wouldn’t be so easy to get rid of those protesters, but anyway.
Sir George Young replies (via ConHome):
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for once again raising this issue. I support the action that the Mayor of London took a few months ago to clear the green in the middle of the square, and I hope that that area will be restored to the condition in which it used to be. In the meantime, the camps have simply moved to the pavement. That is wholly unacceptable, and it is not what one should see in the centre of an historic capital city. We are going to consider legislation in the forthcoming Home Office Bill to put the situation right.
Just what we need – more legislation to restrict the rights of protesters around Parliament.
I wonder if all those people who complained when Labour did this (and that was idiotic too) will do so now.
Should we really be slamming the Beeb?
Sunny draws attention to the latest risible claims of right-wing loon tank Migration Watch.
Apparently, the UK loses £4.6bn educating the children of migrants. Except that figure looks rather shaky when you learn it includes as immigrants anybody who happened to have a foreign-born parent. (So despite having British citizenship, because my mum is French MW count my vast and on-going British education as a pay-out to immigrant families!) As if that method wasn’t bad enough, the Office of National Statistics claims not to know how MW obtained any figures on parent birth place to begin with. Further demolition can be found here.
I admit: different day, same risible nonsense from MW. What actually animates me this morning is Sunny’s gunning for the BBC over its failures to report the MW nonsense as such.
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That’s the thing about Eton
It is terribly bad form for a chap to come over all chippy about his education. Frankly, that’s the sort of stuff one would expect from a provincial Grammar School boy, and not a journalist, novelist and historian of the stature of Guy Walters.
Nevertheless, the Old Etonian has devoted a post on the Daily Telegraph-sponsored blog to make plain his umbrage at the way a book review in the Jewish Chronicle casually takes a pop at him for being an Old Etonian.
‘That’s the thing with Eton,’ he notes. ‘A good schoolfriend of mine once said that you can be prime minister, attempt a coup in a West African state, even be a king, but to others, first and foremost, you’ll always be an Eamonn. I can live with it, even if Mr Low can’t.
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