First class chaps

Ken

"straightened"? You mean "straitened" as in straitened circumstances - hard up, impecunious, penniless, penurious, pinched!

Chingford Man

I actually have a degree of sympathy for the bombastic Sir Nicholas despite the family trust and his foot-in-mouth responses. Why do planes have business class and trains first class? To enable those travelling as part of their job to work at the same time. You could query whether the taxpayer should be paying for it but that is a different matter.

I suspect most people travelling First Class are very glad to be away from the iPods, the bawling children and the horrid behaviour of increasing numbers of Britons in standard class.

THX1138

Eric "who eat all the pies"Pickles had his own brush with the electorate on the train and he wasn't happy about it either.

http://is.gd/8FmND

2trueblue

This couple just epitomise the 'they just don't get it' brigade. They are truely odious. They claimed more that £80,000 renting a property from a trust, controlled by their children, with our money. They have milked the system for everything they could get and think that we should pay for them to travel as THEY see fit.
If they think that working as an MP is hard work then they should have taken a job in the private sector and seen life as it really can be. MPs rarely get fired, either for incompetence, or as we have discovered for claiming'wrongley/inappropriately' on their expenses. In the real world this would not have happened. MPs live in a rarefied world where they make their rules/laws.

Charlie

Winterton is a risible buffoon. We will be well rid of him at the next Election.

More importantly we must make sure that we are rid of that other risible character, Brown too.

paulg

This is the type of cretin that must be moved out of the conservative party, conservative ideas must not be tainted by this type of individual: arrogant, presumptive and stupid.
It might be a good move for David Cameron to deselect him, call for him to stand down and, use it as an excuse to get Gordon Brown to call an immediate general election.

John David Barnett

Senior Civil Servants to whose pay scales MPs are tied, travel First Class.

Why not MPs?

Holly ......

Let's just forget that Brown's trip to officially open a school,where the cabinet held a meeting AT A COST OF ABOUT £200,000.
The school was open in April 2009.
Now why would Good old Gordon open a nice new shiny school that was already open AND hold a cabinet meeting?
Lets just focus on pompous old Tories who are GONE at the next election,making this a good diversion tactic.

Verity

Thank you, Ken. I was about to leap in myself. But at least David got hoi polloi right.

Derek

The good MPs should travel First Class and the bad Third Class.

Frank P

Ken - Straightened/straitened: in criminal argot, straightened means bunged - bribed! I think David B probably has it about right in parliamentary terminology, since NuLab re-furbished the gravy train and increased the size of the troughs..

Colin

I listened to the whole 5 Live show. I thought the ignorant, parasite that is Steven Nolan was a disgrace. He invited Nicholas Winterton on to talk about the Falklands, then proceeded to ambush him on the subject of expenses.

Winterton was excellent, he stood his ground and ended up making Nolan sound like a complete chopper. As for the halfwits who phoned in; as I've written elsewhere, they sounded like a good advert for denying some people the vote.

He's not my MP, I don't approve of his conduct in relation to his use of the ACA, but I think his standing down will be a loss to parliament. On the subject of the Falklands, he was authoritative, informative and a million miles from the hack automatons that now infest parliament, on all sides.

Winterton's comments about people who don't travel in first class, being of a different standard have been reported way out of context. He was, in my view, making the valid point that people travelling in standard class don't always have peace and quiet and serious work in mind, when they travel on our railways. The fact is, he's absolutely correct. In my extensive experience, standard class coaches on both the east and west coast inter city lines can be like Zoos. I know that his comments will have struck a chord with many people, who's journey's have been ruined by the shocking behaviour of some fellow travellers.

Almost as disturbing as Nolan's infantile goading of Winterton was that literally within minutes, the bbc was leading bulletins, triumphantly reporting that Winterton had referred to standard class passengers as being somehow inferior to first class passengers. If you listen carefully to the line of questioning by Nolan, the obvious set piece nature of the audience phone in and the immediate reporting of the exchange, It all sounded a bit too much like a co-ordinated set up.

I'm only sorry that Nicholas Winterton didn't think to ask Nolan as to why so many bbc execs are paid as much as they are, but more pertinently, why they seem to such a cavalier attitude to public money when it comes to expenses. Perhaps we need a media led investigation into that...

Bean Counter

First Class doesn't exist for people who want to work. It exists to identify non-price sensitive customers who are granted the privilege of cross-subsidising the 'others'.
You could therefore make the argument that Sir N is selflessly keeping everyone else's fares down. Maybe there should be some sort of rota system as to who travels in first however? Just a thought.

Chingford Man

I went to school with Winterton's interviewer Stephen Nolan in Belfast. I well remember him sitting at the front of the Latin class of the legendary Billy "Duster" Bennett, sucking up to Duster like mad, as we all conjugated together.

To be fair, Stevie Boy good at what he does and has form in ambushing unwise politicos of the foot-in-mouth kind. He was the interviewer who set traps for Iris Robinson to tumble into when she infamously opined about homosexuality. Stevies’s trick is to ask “Do you believe in x?”, which is often something that can be easily construed as outrageous, and hope that his guest replies “Yes”. That’s what undid Mrs Robinson and now, I suspect, Sir Nicholas.

RL54

Having listened in to SNW yesterday with Nolan (please tell me he is no relation to the sisters)I have complete sympathy with the forthright Winterton. It was quite clear, even to thicko Journeyman Nolan (desperate to get his own show)what Sir Nicholas meant - you cannot work properly in an environment such as standard class with it's cramped seating and constant bmp bmp of ipods/phones and inane chatter. Wasn't it Nolan who complained recently about how crowded the trains were?

Pot Head

Colin -Typical Tory blame the messenger

SUSAN HILL

When I travel by train I work and read and so I always choose the quiet carriage. It enables me to get on without the ipods and the mobiles. Other people tend to be working too. I have travelled first class with huge businessmen on wall-to-wall mobiles with laptops and fast food. Nothing is guaranteed on public transport.

cmp

Colin - bang on

Justin

And guess what? This time next year MPs will still be traveling 1st Class.

My guess is that what Winterton said is quietly supported by MPs from all 3 major parties.

Frank P

One of the main reasons that the motor car became so popular is that that most people would grab any chance not to be gratuitously exposed to close proximity to their fellow man. Locks and fences were invented for the same reason. Winterton was honestly expressing what most people think. Some folk buy small sports cars so that they escape from their own families even.

Anyway, a few years ago when I occasionally commuted by train, I found it was pretty futile buying a first class ticket when crowded trains gave the standing tight-wads the moral right to spill in with their cheaper tickets. The guards and ticket collectors couldn't have cared less.

I remember Peregrine Worsthorne writing once that the way to rid yourself of unwanted companions or interlopers in first class carriages was to always make sure one had curry for supper the day before travelling, and to pass wind as loudly as possible each time any intruder appeared. I found myself on the receiving end of that philosophy once - very effective!

Last point; if we treat our MPs as Second Class citizens, will we not reap what we sow? I know, I know ... it couldn't get much worse - but that remains to be seen after 6th May.