Farce Crapital Conmerchants - No end to the Thameslink misery, so it's time for action

Hard pressed commuters in Mill Hill are sick of Farce Crapital Conmerchants. We buy our season tickets and all we expect in return is the service that is in the timetable. They are very good at apologies and excuses, but this just isn't good enough. They say "please claim compensation" - again this isn't good enough. First Group makes huge profits, the Managing Director, Muir Lockhead gets the best part of a million quid in "compensation" for running this failed company. The system for claiming compensation is deliberately difficult to use. Why? because this discourages people from claiming. The previous company running the service had a better scheme. You got a discount on your next season ticket if they failed to meet the required service level. What happened? First Group changed this to maximise profits, to make it as hard to use as possible.

I wrote to our MP, Andrew Dismore to see if he could do anything, as the government runs the franchises. You may have noticed press reports that National Express were stripped of their East Anglia franchise for "upsetting the Government". It seems that upsetting the Government is more serious than upsetting the people who pay for the service. Mr Dismore sent me a nice letter back. Unfortunately, he's not really done anything at all other than this. It contains THIS LINK TO HIS WEBSITE with a reply from FCC.  In it, FCC say they've done all they can. This is rubbish. They could have settled the dispute, then employed more drivers so that the Union can't pull this stunt again.

The reason they don't is because they are making more money than ever. By cramming us into trains like cattle and not paying overtime, they make even more money. The Answer is simple. For every day since the dispute started, they refund season ticket holders the percentage of services not running. So if they fail to run 50% of services, season ticket holders get a refund of equivalent to 50% one days travel. Of course they will squeal that this is impossible. I'm sure that if the Government told them "do it or lose the franchise" they'd soon change their mind.

I bumped into the Lib Dem Parliamentary candidate for Hendon, Matthew Harris earlier. I told him what I thought about the whole business and he agreed. He is urgently working on a plan of action TO REALLY HOLD FCC TO ACCOUNT, which he'll be emailing to me in the next couple of days. He has a track record of extracting U-Turns from the Government with well planned and popular campaigns, such as this one to reverse the cuts to TA Army training. When I hear the details of Matthews plan of action, I will post it here and I urge all commuters, regardless of their party allegiance to take part, it's about service, not politics. In these times when politicians seem happy to hide in their central London flats and cop huge allowances, we really should support the few who are prepared to actually do something. I sincerely hope that the candidates from the other parties also join in Matthews campaign, to form a united Mill Hill front against FCC. He's doing the hard work getting the campaign together, it would be nice to see a message of support for the campaign to post here from our MP, Andrew Dismore and the Tory challenger Matthew Offord. The campaign is called

NO WAY TO RUN A RAILWAY

Anyone wishing to take part can email me BY CLICKING HERE. We plan to start by doing a survey of commuters in approx 2 weeks time (got to write it and get it printed), so we can get the views of commuters. Anyone who could help giving these out, please get in touch. We want to give a copy to ALL MILL HILL commuters travelling in the rush hour.