When Twitter made me sound like a Tory
Twitter, the current darling of new media whatever, has long bugged me for one major reason - while 140 characters are enough to express a thought or an opinion, they leave no room for nuance. 140 characters are enough for a snark, for a slogan or for a simply expressed opinion. They’re not enough for conveying any further data. That opinion has to stand by itself, like a political slogan on a poster, context-free. Any opinion more complex than what Twitter originally claimed to be for - What are you doing right now? - doesn’t really belong there.
But still we try. We post our kneejerk reactions, our opinions, and whatever else comes to mind, trying to squeeze them into 140 characters. We strip them down, remove the context, eliminate the further discussion and the “yes, but…” bits. All that’s left is the bare essentials.
This means that tweets never make people sound like they’re on the fence about anything. Politically, you’re either a right-on leftie or a dyed-in-the-wool Tory. After all, the extremes of the political spectrum are the ones most likely to communicate in slogans (in the case of the extreme right, mostly misspelled slogans written in crayon).
And thus I was shocked to see that I’d managed to make myself sound like a Tory earlier this evening, and the reactions reinforced that. How did that happen? I’m not a Tory! I’m a kind of moderate left-of-centre guy, a “wouldn’t it be nice if everyone was nice” type. I grew up under the jackboot of the Thatcher junta! I cheered for Neil Kinnock in 1992 and cheered for Tony Blair for at least a little while after May 1997 before giving in to nauseous, crushing disappointment! How could I, of all people, be coming across like Boris Johnson about to trash a restaurant at a Bullingdon Club dinner?
Here’s what happened. I’d read a story on fixmytransport.com, a useful website which helps people get their problems and complaints and so on back to the right transport providers and public bodies in the UK, in the hope of getting them fixed. The complainant was recounting a particularly horrific journey where their reserved seat had been taken, the ticket collector had refused to do anything, and a pregnant woman had had to sit on the floor outside the toilet. Anyone can agree that bloody hell, that’s awful. Attached to it, though, was a signup box where you could add yourself to a list calling for people to be allowed to sit in First Class if there’s no room in Standard Class (what the UK started calling Second Class a while ago in an attempt to make it sound less, well, second class).
After reading that, I scooched my mouse across to the Twitter client and tweeted:
I hate to be posh here, but “Railways should let you sit in first class if there aren’t any seats free in second” is.. a bit demanding.
That’s 135 characters.
The reaction was, understandably, swift and terrible. You mean the plebs shouldn’t be allowed to expect a seat for their expensive tickets? If there are empty seats or a mostly-empty first class, why shouldn’t people sit there? Isn’t it being pretty rude saying that’s being demanding?
Gods, I realised. And then I tried to defend myself. And as always happens when you try and extract the spaghetti of your thought processes that leads to a particular opinion and justify it in 140 characters, it only made things worse. I’d prefer it if first class was just abolished on busy routes, I said. First class in the UK is insanely expensive compared to other countries, I said. A passenger in first class is one who’s not having to fit in second, but it’s so overpriced it’s often mostly empty, I said. But nothing would get away from the original statement, however much I attempted to plead my case in 140-character snippets.
Finally I just gave up, ran away, and started shopping for blazers and practicing my looks of crowing Tory superiority. From now on, the Internet would hold irrefutable evidence of my being a closet right-winger, and there was nothing I could do about it.
So what did I really mean to say, which got squeezed down into those 135 fatal characters? Here it is, and it takes a lot more than 140 characters:
Well, overcrowding’s a difficult problem. Most first class travellers are regular commuters, which means that off-peak demand for first class is very low compared to standard. The design of modern rolling stock makes it almost impossible to add extra standard class or take out first class carriages when the demand isn’t there for first class. The railways don’t really want to haul around empty first class seats all day either, but they’re stuck with them.
At the same time, first class tickets are obscenely expensive even by UK rail standards - usually over twice the price. That’s a lot of money. In Europe the difference in comfort between first and second class is often (but by no means always) less, but the price differential is way smaller. If first class is priced more affordably, more people will travel first class, and as every passenger in a first class seat is a passenger who doesn’t have to fit into standard, it helps lighten the load on standard class too. But like it or not, first class season tickets are such a revenue stream that the railways aren’t going to want to compromise that except in very limited circumstances such as the “Weekend First” offers. This means that first class commuters, the people most likely to experience trains where standard class gets really full, are likely to be a little sullen and resentful if what they see as the unwashed masses start coming and cluttering up their nice quiet first class carriages. They might even stop bothering to pay for first class themselves - after all, if the trains they travel on are always full in standard class, why not just go straight to first class and sit there regardless of the class of travel on your ticket?
Guards already have the power to use their discretion and upgrade passengers as appropriate when standard class is full (and I’ve seen this happen), although passengers are only allowed to do this with the guard’s permission in order to avoid the above-mentioned free-for-all. But increasing numbers of trains don’t carry proper guards at all, so there’s nobody to ask. What the passenger thinks of as “the guard” might well be a revenue protection inspector, whose sole function is to check tickets. They’re usually employed by an employment agency, and they’re most definitely not paid to think or to use their discretion. They probably don’t even have good knowledge of the conditions of carriage, so half the passengers who went and sat in first without getting the okay to do so would find themselves arguing with a poorly paid, badly-trained RPI who wanted to excess them for not being in the right class.
There’s also another enforcement problem with a free for all. There’ll always be people who will chance their luck and just go and sit in first anyway. When the guard comes along and grips them, they’ll claim “Oh, there weren’t any seats”, and the guard will spend half the journey walking up and down the train pointing out to people that yes, there are indeed free seats here in standard class, would you mind moving there? and.. yes, more arguments would follow.
Ultimately, first class on UK trains has priced itself out of the market for anyone other than the properly wealthy. It’s become a contributor to the overcrowding problem in standard as so few people can afford to travel in it, and even those who can are likely to think that it’s way too expensive and travel in standard anyway. A superior solution is a single-class yet comfortable service, such as Chiltern Railways offer, which eliminates the imbalance, but that’s not going to happen on many other operators due to the aforementioned huge buckets of cash that first class seasons bring in.
There should also be better accommodation for people who really need seats. In Belgium, for instance, NMBS allows pregnant women to travel first class for the last four months of their pregnancy. There’s no reason why they couldn’t extend that here - make sure that if it’s busy the people who really need seats get them without crowding out first class so much its reason for existence is rendered pointless. No railway is able to guarantee everyone a seat - it’s simply not possible without 100% reservation requirements - but if someone who’s paid more than twice the fare can’t get a seat because first class is full of displaced standard class ticket holders, one of the big reasons for travelling first class goes away, and so does the first class ticket revenue. First class ticket holders, I’d guess, are more likely to switch to driving than squeezing into a busy standard class, so the revenue from that passenger’s lost entirely, not just reduced.
There are more imaginative solutions than an automatic “Standard full? Just go and sit in First” entitlement, which is an attractive solution on the face of it but which would most likely cause more problems than it solves.
Now, how can I squeeze that into 140 characters?
