WAYNE’S WORLD
stand waiting for virtually no passengers getting off trains. If you are affected by this, please write in to PHTM.
As I write this we are just a few hours past the Supreme Court ruling on Uber and the self-employed (or are they employed), rights shenanigans. I’ll give a fuller view next month due to copy deadlines, but time and space permits me to write a few words.
First of all, I congratulate James Farrar and Yaseen Aslam, two blokes who took on a giant, and like David vs. Goliath, these guys won. The judgement will undoubtedly have an affect far beyond what they ever thought possible.
even God couldn’t trust the Englishman in the dark”. I guess it’s a similar thing with councils.
A quick Google led me to the Institute for government website; apparently, metro mayors were invented in the dying years of the previous labour government (over a decade ago). It was part of devolution to local government from, presumably, national government.
Judging by their response to this particular part of the pandemic, the allocation of grants, I sincerely suggest they are scrapped. Not only in terms of the pandemic have they proven to be a distraction, it does appear they are just another level of bureaucracy.
And yes, I’m going to bring the Brexit thing into this. One of the reasons cited for leaving the EU, well for those who aren’t racist xenophobes anyway, was to get away from UK politicians blaming someone else (i.e. the EU) as the penultimate reason they couldn’t do anything. Well, now we have a situation where we see UK politicians blaming other UK politicians as a reason for them not being able to help. As already proven, I’m no Sherlock Holmes, but you don’t have to be Sherlock to conclude this isn’t how it’s supposed to work.
Sorry, not my fault guv, it’s them over there. Fish, blue passports, damned foreigners. Does all of this sound familiar?
The truth is that local authorities have been allocated money from national government, and it is for the local authorities to determine who is allocated funding – despite all of the b/s.
A group of people that have been seemingly completely forgotten in all of this are those taxi drivers who pay for permits to work ranks on railway property. People have been told not to travel without good reason, it is illegal to go on holiday, and therefore the footfall through railway stations is minimal.
Way back in June 2020 the Financial Times wrote: “UK tax- payers face a bill of at least £3.5bn to bail out train companies because of the coronavirus crisis, according to government estimates.” Yet despite receiving billions of pounds of taxpayers money, rail firms continue to charge taxis the full amount to
MARCH 2021
The fact Uber took the claim as far as it did, does seem to completely undo what they stated in their press release a few minutes after the final judgement, that the judgement only affects a few of their drivers. I mean, if it only affected a few, why would they spend hundreds of thousands of pounds pushing this thing as far as they could?
I wager a multitude of private hire companies are currently celebrating this victory, but are they?
The way I see it, they celebrate a ‘Pyrrhic victory’ such as Brexit with the fishing industry, sure we can catch all the British shellfish we can, but we can’t sell them to anyone who actually wants to eat them, like those EU countries, despite what John Redwood says. Uber is the head of the fish and according to Turkish legend ‘a fish rots from the head down’.
Virtually every other private hire company in the country operates in a manner similar to Uber, there is of course one key difference. Practically every other company will tell you to remove their equipment, if you, as a driver work, for another operator and this is probably right, but the problem with this comes the responsibilities.
Following on with the godly quotes, the modus operandi is ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me’ or in more straight- forward terms, ‘if you do any work for them, then you’re out on your arse sunshine’. And we are then told, laughably, there is no ‘master and servant’ relationship.
Of course, Uber very probably has a backup plan, just be the platform and brand, all they need to do is buy other app based platforms, like perhaps Autocab.
Till next month, keep safe.
By Wayne Casey Admin Officer, NTA
The views expressed in this column may not be those of the NTA, NPHTA or PHTM
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