Hold the front page, sound the alarm, remember where you were – the Lib Dems have come up with a good idea for once. Reinforcing the old adage that even a stopped clock is right twice a day, Ed Davey’s party has announced a genuinely sensible policy: that playing music out loud on public transport should be made illegal. The party is looking to amend the Bus Services Bill, currently making its way through the Lords, to include fines of up to £1,000 for offenders. It’s almost enough to make me put a ‘winning here’ sign in my window.
Anyone who uses public transport in 2025 will have experienced the growing phenomenon of the headphone dodgers. If they’re not blasting out drill music at full volume, they’re having a shouty conversation using their speakerphone. While some are seemingly oblivious to their selfishness, others revel in their brazenness: as if they’re daring their fellow passengers to intervene. On the rare occasion I’ve witnessed some brave soul politely ask a culprit to turn their music down, the response has not been kind. And so the problem grows.
It’s not so much the noise itself that bothers me, but the lack of common courtesy. As a nation, we used to pride ourselves on our politeness. We’d apologise profusely for causing even a minor inconvenience. We’d liberally scatter ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ throughout every conversation. Yet now, millions of us have to suffer the daily indignity of being subjected to a full-volume rendition of some other muppet’s Spotify playlist.
I suppose it’s the modern equivalent of winding down your car windows and thumping out Eminem for the entire high street to hear. When I first learned to drive, my friend (a fellow young fogey) and I decided to hit back by driving through the centre of Bristol blasting Beethoven’s ninth. We thought we were striking a blow for taste and decency. In hindsight, we were being just as selfish. Thankfully, we grew out of it. But whilst I now spend my daily commute wearing earpods, I see passengers of all ages joining the headphone dodgers.
Sadly, I’m not surprised the problem is getting worse. The London underground, in particular, increasingly tolerates all manner of indiscretions, from the inconsiderate to the downright illegal. Fare-dodging is blatant, pick-pocketing is on the rise, and as I wrote about for these pages recently, even smoking crack on the Victoria Line barely raises an eyebrow. Against this backdrop, is it any wonder that people don’t feel the need to keep their musical tastes and personal phone conversations to themselves?
Not every country is so permissive. In Dubai, passengers can be fined up to two hundred dirham for playing loud music on the metro. In the French city of Nantes, a man was recently fined €200 for making a call on loudspeaker at a railway station. In Singapore, you can even be fined five hundred dollars for eating the wrong fruit (the notoriously pungent durian) on the MRT.
So credit where it’s due: the Lib Dems are onto something. Lisa Smart, the party’s home affairs spokesperson, says many people now ‘dread their daily commute’ and that ‘headphone dodgers playing loud music on buses and trains are some of the worst offenders’. Crucially, she acknowledges the crux of the problem, that many people ‘feel too intimidated to speak up when someone is blasting music or other content from a phone or speaker’.
Headphone dodgers may not be the biggest problem with public transport in this country, but they’re the thin end of an increasingly large wedge. If the authorities were serious about cracking down on the culprits, it would set a precedent for more serious offences. Let’s hope the government listens to the Lib Dems for once. The silent majority – in every sense of that phrase – are with them.
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