Keep East Coast Public – Petition Hand-in

1st October 2013 | Demonstration / News / Petition

On the morning of 18 October, Bring Back British Rail is joining forces with our friends at We Own It and Action For Rail, to descend on Parliament with our 38 Degrees petition to Keep East Coast Public.

We have over 20,000 signatures already. If you don’t want to see our only publicly run rail route, fall back into the hands of the profiteers, then please make sure you add your name to the list before 18 October, and share the link with all your friends and colleagues too!
https://you.38degrees.org.uk/p/keepeastcoastpublic

Please come and support us the day! Join us at Westminster and get behind our Bring Back British Rail banner and placards as we hand over the petition to Patrick McLoughlin, Secretary of State for Transport.

Friday 18 October 2013
9:30 – 10:30 (10:00am photocall)

Old Palace Yard
Westminster
London SW1

At 10am we’ll be joined outside Westminster by Caroline Lucas MP (Green) and Lillian Greenwood MP (Labour) for speeches in support of the petition and a photocall.

If you’re in Edinburgh, please join Sheila Gilmore MP, Ian Murray MP, Mark Lazarowicz MP and Sarah Boyack MSP (Labour) for a Keep East Coast Public event outside Edinburgh Waverley Station on Princess Street from 11.30 – 13:00.

38 Degrees

Public Ownership Day of Action

7th August 2013 | Demonstration / News

Public Ownership For Our Railways

Momentum is building for Public Ownership For Our Railways, with the launch of this new nationwide campaign coordinated by Action For Rail and supported by Bring Back British Rail, We Own It, The ACT! Alliance, the Campaign against Climate Change and many other organisations around the country.

Join us for the national Day of Action on Tuesday 13 August at stations all over the country and at our big demo outside London Kings Cross Station.

Demonstration in London:
Tuesday 13 August 2013
7:45 – 9:00AM
King’s Cross Station
(outside the new Pancras Road entrance)

Actions are also taking place from 8:00 – 9:00AM (unless otherwise stated) outside these major railway stations: Alnmouth 9:30 – 11:00, Ashford International, Aylesbury, Berwick Upon Tweed (9:00 – 10:00), Birmingham International (7:30 – 17:00), Birmingham New Street (7:30 – 9:00), Bletchley, Brighton (11:00 – 12:00 with Caroline Lucas), Bristol Stapleton Road (7:00 – 9:00), Bristol Temple Meads (7:30 – 9:00), Canterbury West (6:50 – 8:30), Chatham (7:00 – 8:30), Chelmsford, Coventry (7:00 – 9:00), Derby (7:15 – 8:45), Doncaster, Ealing Broadway (17:00 – 19:00), Edinburgh Waverley (7:30 – 9:00), Glasgow Central (7:30 – 9:00), Glasgow Queen Street (16:30 – 18:00), Hastings, Homerton (7:45 – 9:00), Lancaster (16:00 – 18:00), Leeds, Littlehampton, Liverpool Lime Street (7:30 – 9:00), London Kings Cross (7:45 – 9:00), London Paddington (8:00 – 10:00), London Victoria (7:30 – 9:00), London Waterloo (7:45 – 9:00), Manchester Piccadilly (7:30 – 9:30), Matlock Bath, Newcastle Central (7:30 – 9:00), Norwich (6:00 – 10:00), Peterborough (8:00 – 9:00), Preston (16:00 – 18:00), Putney (17:30 – 19:30), Raynes Park (17:30 – 18:30), Reading (17:00 – 18:00), Rochester, Scarborough (17:00 – 19:00), Southampton Central, Southport (7:30 – 9:30), Sudbury, Tonbridge (9:00 – 11:00), Watford Junction, Weymouth (7:45 – 9:00) and York.

If you plan to go along to any of these, make sure you order some free Bring Back British Rail stickers or merchandise before the weekend so we can get them out to you in time!

Keep East Coast Public

1st August 2013 | Demonstration / News

Keep East Coast Public

Bring Back British Rail is joining forces with Action For Rail, We Own It and many other groups and organisations around the country (listed below) to launch the new Keep East Coast Public campaign this summer.

In November 2009 the East Coast mainline was re-nationalised when National Express abruptly handed back the keys, after they realised it wasn’t the cash cow they had hoped.

Now in public ownership, East Coast is thriving – it receives the lowest subsidy of any of the train operators and has returned nearly £800m in profit to the taxpayer in the last four years.

East Coast is the rare success story of this disastrous franchise system. In public ownership it has brought us that one step closer to our dream of Bringing Back British Rail. We cannot let the Tories re-privatise East Coast and watch the profiteers mess things up again!

Sign the petition on 38 Degrees >
Write to your MP using Action For Rail’s online tool >

Coalition For Public Ownership

Write to your MP!

26th June 2013 | Demonstration / News

Today, Caroline Lucas Green Party MP introduced an Early Day Motion to the UK Parliament calling for the Public Ownership of the Railways.

Bring Back British Rail supporters, we must seize this opportunity!

Please WRITE TO YOUR MP TODAY, and ask them to sign up to ‘Early Day Motion 303’, if only for the simple economic fact that we are now subsidising our railways by two to three times more than we did before they were privatised in 1994. That’s £1.2 billion of taxpayers money per year being wasted as a result of the inefficiencies of this ridiculous franchise system.

Please see the Re-building Rail and The Great Train Robbery reports for more great facts like these.

The Great Train Robbery

7th June 2013 | Evidence / News

The Great Train Robbery

Today sees the launch of The Great Train Robbery – a new report by the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC) about the failings of rail privatisation in the UK.

It rightly describes the privatised rail system as “a serial shambles creating artificial profits for the franchise holders and hidden costs for the public.”

Together with the 2012 Rebuilding Rail report by Transport for Quality of Life, this provides yet more strong evidence for the Bring Back British Rail campaign that we need a re-unified national rail network run for people not profit.

Read the report

Response to Network Rail Bonuses

30th May 2013 | Media Coverage / News

Evening Standard

Evening Standard (page 57)
Thursday 30 May 2013

With ever increasing inequality in this country, the news of Network Rail chief’s big bonuses makes sickening reading for the growing numbers of normal working people who struggle to pay extortionate train fares.

The big question here is not the size of this specific round of bonuses (most alone are more than four times the average UK salary), but more whether such a fundamental public service as our railways should be run by the same loathsome bonus culture that dominates our disgraced banking sector.

This culture has, of course, resulted from the disastrous privatisation of British Rail in 1994, which attempted to ‘introduce a market’ into a sector where it is completely illogical to do so. Numerous private companies running different sections of the railway now ‘compete’ with each other when what we really need to make sure trains run on time, is cooperation.

The aim of a public transport system should be to provide the best possible service for everyone. This is essential in an age where we must drastically reduce our collective C02 emissions by encouraging more people to use trains rather than gas guzzling cars or short-haul flights. The only way we will achieve this is by bringing back British Rail and creating a newly reunified public transport system run for people not profit.

But in the short-term, while we continue to fight for this common sense solution to become a reality, we must demand that these bonuses are not handed out to individuals (who have failed to do their jobs), but are invested back into the railway network for the benefit of all.

Ellie Harrison
Founder, Bring Back British Rail

Join the Action Against Fare Rises this New Year!

19th December 2012 | Demonstration / News

Merry Christmas! Our rail fares are set to increase above inflation again this January for the tenth year in a row! We already have to pay more to travel by train than any other country in Europe thanks to the failings of privatisation.

#FAREFAIL

Bring Back British Rail is joining forces with our partners Together for Transport, Climate Rush, SHIFT Campaign, The ACT! Alliance and TSSA to launch another #FAREFAIL protest this New Year.

When you go back to work at the start of January and get a nasty shock at the cost of your commute, make sure you tell the coalition government how angry you are!

  • Tweet @transportgovuk using #farefail #railfail

  • Or send a message to your MP via the #FAREFAIL website