travelling first class?

February 14 saw one of the periodic but unexceptional evenings of mayhem at Liverpool Street Station, London's rail gateway to the east. An apparent suicide at Romford Station had caused entire system meltdown, with cancelled trains and a station packed with commuters unable to move, and becoming uncomfortably familiar with each other. Or, as the train company's information system would later describe it, "a fatality at Romford with associated reactionary effects", implying to my mind some sort of right-wing coup.

Today I noticed the train operating company's latest poster campaign against attacks on its employees. Clearly physical abuse is unacceptable, and should be condemned in the strongest possible terms. But it did make me think: if you are running a service that is so poor, you have to dissuade people from attacking your staff, maybe you need to rethink the nature of that service provision.