In the modern political world, you don’t get anywhere without a movement, and movements don’t get anywhere without a flag. So we’ve decided it’s time to take action and stand up for a very large group of people who are genuinely discriminated against and significantly disadvantaged in our society.
Here’s their symbol.
Today is July 1st, and we officially, on behalf of all our oppressed kinfolk, declare this to be People Who Aren’t Eligible For A Railcard Pride Month.
The colours of the flag come from here:
As the image above notes, more than 45 million people in the UK are currently unfairly discriminated against by being ineligible for a Railcard, which normally gives you 1/3 off the price of any train ticket for £30 a year.
During a cost-of-living crisis this is clearly a very non-trivial benefit. On the cheapest off-peak open return between Bath and Bathgate, for example, it’d save you £74 – two and a half times the cost of the card – on that one return journey alone. Over a year it could save the average person hundreds of pounds.
We’ve never understood why it’s legal to discriminate against people on the basis of age when it comes to Railcards. Age discrimination in the provision of public services is against the law, expressed by the Equality Act 2010.
But for some reason there’s an exemption written in for “concessions”.
Yet there’s clearly no intrinsically valid justification for why people aged from 30 to 60 ought to have to pay 50% more for a train ticket than people outside that age range.
Why should a hard-working 31-year-old nurse have to pay so much more to get to work than a 29-year-old Premiership footballer on £100,000 a week or a 60-year-old millionaire banker? Why should couples who go everywhere together (and for whom everything’s already cheaper due to 2-for-1 offers and the like) get a big subsidy at the expense of single people, or couples who have different interests? It’s blatantly unfair, and it affects tens of millions of people, yet nobody cares.
Everybody wants more people to use trains rather than cars, yet everybody knows they’re insanely expensive (vastly more so than most European countries) and out of the reach of millions of normal people as a result.
Yet no politician advocates extending Railcards to everyone, even though it would make far more difference to far more people’s lives than lots of pointless tinkering with taxes and National Insurance and benefits ever does. (Even if it had to be restricted to off-peak hours, when most trains are three-quarters empty, because commuter ones are jammed already.)
But they fall over themselves in the rush to pander to the microscopic number of trans people, who are NOT in reality discriminated against or disadvantaged in any way. They endlessly ponce about on marches and recite slogans and light up government buildings and bedeck public transport and streets and police officers and pedestrian crossings and pass vastly unpopular and damaging laws in the service of this tiny privileged minority, and claim to be “progressive” as a result.
And, y’know, maybe it’s just because the LGBTQIAA++ community have such a lot of snazzy flags. Everyone loves a bright and colourful flag!
So we’ve addressed the issue. Of course, with so many Pride flags it’s hard to keep track of them all and know what’s being championed, so we thought we better make ours clear and easy to understand.
Then it was pointed out that of course fossil fuels are deeply problematic and we didn’t want to get cancelled before we started on the grounds of being unsustainable, so we quickly revised the design.
(With a choice of styles because diversity, obv.)
So let’s get out there, people. Print those flags, and stickers and badges and banners. Make your voice heard and demand equal rights for the tens of millions of able-bodied and childless between 31 and 59! We deserve trains too!
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