The Real Press is partly a new way of publishing and thinking about history, and partly – in a small way – an attempt to reinvent publishing. So when David Boyle suddenly found himself receiving hundreds of messages about the bizarre unravelling of the Southern Railways, he thought it was a perfect moment to show what could be done.
In the course of a week, he had researched and written, and we had published, his book Cancelled! It is now available in a range of formats (and as an ePub file from today) and 10p of the cover price goes to the Rail Benefit Fund (the ebook only costs £1.99).
It shows that publishing doesn’t have to wait for a year between the delivery of a manuscript and it hitting the bookshelves.
The rest of this post updates the story a little (and a version of it is also published here).
We had wondered whether the situation with Southern Railways had improved a little. It seemed unlikely that we could lose a Prime Minister, most of the shadow cabinet, the England football manager, Boris Johnson – and still face chaos on the train lines to the coast. But that was clearly naive.
Perhaps the element that we find particularly frustrating about the situation is the way that government ministers are defending operators Govia Thameslink Railway – the rail minister Claire Perry even went out of her way to praise their managers. And the way so many MPs who should know better are still blaming the situation on some kind of industrial dispute.
The truth is there is really no evidence at all that the rise in sickness has anything to do with the rail unions – and quite a lot of evidence that it has everything to do with rising stress levels among the staff.
David was overwhelmed with information and personal testimony after my first blog posts on this (read by over 100,000 people so far) and he researched and wrote a book about the situation called Cancelled!, now available on Kindle, as a paperback and as an ePub file.
He writes as follows: “As you can read in the book, I’ve come to believe – having gathered as much information as I possibly could from as wide a range of sources as possible – that the company has little idea themselves why the franchise is grinding to a halt. It just seems easier to blame the unions for something neither they nor ministers can understand.
“They seem to be in the grip of the traditional official fallacy – namely, if we don’t understand why something is happening, it must somehow be someone’s deliberate plot.
“In fact, as you can see in more detail in the book, the situation is a direct result of the centralised management techniques used by GTR – and used by many of the companies which have won public service contracts.
“This is therefore the beginning of what may prove a widespread phenomenon. We shall see.
“In the meantime, I hope MPs will ask about what planning is going into the current cancellations.
“I simply can’t imagine that GTR is being so irresponsible that they are not planning the inevitable cancellations in some kind of regular pattern. In fact, a recently leaked document showed that they were negotiating with the Department or Transport to cancel 192 trains every day.
“The company tell me that the negotiations came to nothing. But there must be some planning going on – otherwise it would be wholly irresponsible.
“But then, if they are really planning which trains to cancel, why are they not keeping passengers informed? Why are they still waiting until five minutes before departure when everyone is on board?
“So which is it – are they failing to plan or are they failing to inform? I think we should be told.”