My First Ride through Starmer’s Britain
One can be forgiven for taking Sir Keir's words at face value. But my train journey to York suggests that the UK's national "weariness" and contempt of public duty is here to stay.
Having enjoyed the gold-tier company of my fellow Islanders for ten hours as part of their landmark election night coverage, for once I looked forward to my return journey to York. I’d have the chance to reflect on the Podcast’s achievements all the while mulling over Sir Keir Starmer’s opening words as Prime Minister, namely his allusions to a national “weariness”, and “a draining away of the hope, the spirit, [and] the belief in a better future”. What I got, however, was a concentrated taste of that very weariness in a country where it has become acceptable for those with public responsibilities to do the absolute minimum on the service front for as long as they exhibit the correct social signifiers along the way.
After being turfed out of my hotel room after just six hours by cleaners who were clearly oblivious to my involvement in an all-night election broadcast, I headed to Swindon station to board the 12:40pm train to the location of my only change: Bristol Temple Meads. Whilst Great Western got me there at 1:30pm without drama or despair, this was to be the only part of my journey that went to plan. The only CrossCountry train running throughout the entire day, due at 2:15pm had been delayed by forty-five minutes due to a "medical emergency" caused by one of the passengers, meaning that I had at least an hour and a half to kill.
Knowing that relocating to one of the coffee shops in the station would involve going back through the digital turnstiles and thus voiding my ticket, I made do with a bench in the Platform 3 courtyard. Having enjoyed a moment of ‘Tesco’s Value tranquillity’ for barely ten minutes, where I would finish a cold and watered-down Americano to mitigate my boredom, I encountered what can only be described as a demagorgan from the intersectional upside-down: a young woman with short, bubblegum pink hair so horizontally challenged and demonstrably ignorant of acceptable hygiene standards despite her face being covered by a Palestine-themed surgical mask that sitting next to me necessitated my eviction from the bench entirely. I’ll delegate no time to unpacking the irony of this outcome because doing so would be insulting to both the reader’s intelligence and my own for having to explain it.
Having vacated the courtyard and the colonised bench in the only direction available, back to Platform 3, and brooded over National Rail’s decision to fill all of their advertising space with posters that advertised nothing but their commitments to ‘net zero’ (evidently at the cost of inside seating and a single litter bin), the sound of an exasperated English cockney gentleman faded in, having what at first sounded like an altercation with the only member of staff not wearing an LGBTQ-themed lanyard. I gleaned the original cause of his exasperation to be one with which I’m unfortunate enough to have a rich history: locating the correct platform to avoid straying from the route carved out by Trainline. However, it soon became clear that the main source of his distress was that for all of the Middle Eastern staff member’s sympathy and unwaning willingness to help, he couldn’t speak English to a remotely acceptable level of proficiency. As such, his extensive efforts only led to both parties ruining each other’s day, with the only consolation for the English cockney being that he wasn’t to board my train, which – shortly after the altercation – was announced to have been delayed by another half an hour.
Mercifully, a whole hour and fifteen minutes later than scheduled, the 2:15pm CrossCountry train to Glasgow finally arrived. As is always the case with the sight of delayed trains rolling into the platform, one immediately parks their resentment in favour of finally being able to sit down and enjoy a nice cup of tea. As it turned out, however, this amounted to expecting too much. For while I did indeed have the opportunity to sit, I discovered through the tannoy that I was on the only long-haul train in the first world that served refreshments on the carriages that I wasn’t on. Having then seethed at the lack of available food and caffeine, not to mention how paralytically slow the train was moving, I made use of the stop at Birmingham to relocate accordingly and join the hoard of additional passengers competing for a seat for access to this luxury. To that end, I succeeded, with the only sacrifice entailing accepting my temporary existence as an extension of the window frame with the assurance that my hunger and caffeine cravings would soon be at an end. That is, before the wait for the trolley became four, and five hours.
Sometime after, to my considerable shock, I spotted a gentleman emerging from the rear end of the carriage with a familiar-looking brown disposable bag. Before long, the re-seated passenger revealed that this bag contained a brown disposable cup of tea and a large biscuit. As such, I waited patiently for another gentleman, who on the aisle seat to my left, to either leave or get up to stretch his legs again so that I could locate this mystery trolley. Of course, what I hoped to see on the other side after bustling past the other deeply pissed-off passengers was the face of an employee who was at least willing to serve. Instead, what I got was one who couldn’t bring himself to look at me because he was too busy packing away the refreshments so that he could get off at Leeds where his shift was due to end. This was shortly before informing me that I had “no business loitering” in the liminal area between the carriages, the only place on the train where it was possible to experience functioning air conditioning, but that I shouldn’t worry because the counter would reopen as soon as a new conductor boarded. The all-important detail the wanker chose to leave out, of course – before stepping off with a broken spring in his step – was that his departure would anchor the train at Leeds station for the next forty minutes. Why? Because there was nobody on standby to replace him, by which point his decision to lock away the refreshments, refusal to look me in the eye, and urgency to escape the scene as soon as he could get away with all made perfect sense. As the train driver announced this delay to its starving passengers, the departing conductor darted off with his noise-cancelling headphones on almost as if to shield himself from a bomb he was about to detonate.
It didn’t seem like it at the time, but this was actually a stroke of good fortune. While some of the other passengers were stuck with this service because it was the only available route to Glasgow, I now had faster options at my disposal. After finding that the earliest train from Leeds to York was, lo and behold, delayed by fifteen minutes, and then another fifteen, I abandoned my plan to board the earliest possible train, picked out a scotch egg from an M&S fridge, and advanced to the only open establishment still selling coffee to takeaway: The Beer House. Regrettably, the saviour complex which I immediately assigned to this familiar looking place did not last long, for while they did indeed serve coffee to takeaway, red tape prevented me from leaving the premises without a container lid. As such, I had no choice but to abandon any hope of getting home indefinitely and make do with a china mug whilst reflecting on how much worse this day could still get. Mercifully for me, it didn’t. I finished my coffee, boarded the 8:15pm Northern Rail train which stopped through York and arrived home at the ripe old time of 10:30pm, over eight hours after my wretched journey from Swindon to York had begun. However, this stroke of good fortune didn’t come without one final swipe from the cosmos of ‘liquid modernity’ that couldn’t possibly encapsulate neoliberalism’s sadistic and yet parodical essence any more succinctly: it was the sight of a timetable instructing passengers to seek the advice of another timetable for information that was its own job to display.
It was David Starkey, a conservative historian, who once said that the British disposition entailed a conviction to act upon “a sense of public duty” out of respect for the impoverished and downtrodden. If the sheer front showcased by this “timetable” is not a perfect expression of the attitude towards public service installed in the soul of Britain, it is hard to imagine what is. This, of course, isn’t all the fault of Britain nor her suffering constituents, but one can be forgiven for taking Keir Starmer’s words at face value. Whatever one’s opinion of his record of breaking his original “pledges” as Labour’s leader and whether there is any sincerity behind his patriotic rebranding of the party, he cannot be accused of failing to read the mood of the nation. Indeed, his reintroduction of a serious, grown-up politics that doesn’t pander to LGBTQ extremists and proposes a proper solution to the boat crisis on the English Channel may be a strategy designed specifically to alleviate the threat of losing seats to Nigel Farage and Reform in 2029. However, at least equally conceivable is that Starmer’s intimate grasp of the UK’s soulless and atomistic condition is because his own Blairite backers subjected Britain to it in the first place.
Image credits: Credit: Pixabay (Pexels)