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Rail Dispute; what is Peter Wilkinson up to?

16th December 2016

Rail Dispute; what is Peter Wilkinson up to?

“Over the next three years we’re going to be having punch ups and we will see industrial action and I want your support,” Peter Wilkinson told residents in Croydon Town Hall last February, people who are also the hapless ‘customers’ of Southern Rail.

Wilkinson is paid £265,000 a year as the Managing Director of Passenger Services at the Department for Transport’s Rail Services. He explained he was up for a fight with railway staff – whatever it might cost other people in distress

“I’m furious about it and it has got to change - we have got to break them,” he said.“They have all borrowed money to buy cars and got credit cards. They can’t afford to spend too long on strike and I will push them into that place. They will have to decide if they want to give a good service or get the hell out of my industry.”

The point is that Southern Rail is not Peter Wilkinson’s industry. The railways were privatised in 1994 and Govia Thameslink Railway currently holds the franchise.
The government says it is not intervening in the present dispute. Wilkinson’s ill-judged outburst shows that is a lie. He has blown the gaff. The Department for Transport under the despised Chris Grayling is directly fomenting the dispute, and massively inconveniencing hundreds of thousands of passengers in the process. Wilkinson is paid more than a quarter of a million a year; his interpretation of ‘Passenger Services’ is to create disruption on the railways!

The government awarded the franchise to the incompetent shower Govia Thameslink Railway, and has resisted all attempts to take it out of their hands. No wonder the Daily Mirror’s headline earlier this week was ‘Renationalise our Railways NOW’.