Mick Hartley

Oh god, those new names for the Overground lines.

The Suffragette Line for Gospel Oak to Barking? What's wrong with the Barking Line? Suffragette Line is such an awkward mouthful, nevermind that the line has nothing at all to do with the suffragettes. "There are delays on the Suffragette Line" What? Which one's that again? It's just performative feel-good nonsense. If you want quirky – and why not? – try the Goblin Line. (Geddit? Gospel Oak to Barking LINe.) It's already used informally, on social media. No doubt similar strange but interesting names could be conjured up for the others – even, if nothing else, a felicitous combination of station names as they did for the Bakerloo line. But Sadiq Khan et al. don't do quirky – just tone-deaf smug.

Janice Turner – I’m done with mayor’s performative politics. "Sadiq Khan’s naming of London’s rail lines typifies a style that prefers virtue-signalling to tackling real problems".

My response to Sadiq Khan, the London mayor, announcing the new lines was a weary groan. Had someone ingested a diversity, equity and inclusion manual and burped them up? You could hear the brainstorm session, the whiteboard guy saying “we need a woman one, a black one, an LGBTQ+ one”. Jews? “Better not.” But there’s the East End, Cable Street … “The Weaver line!” But weren’t the Jews tailors? “Close enough, and if the Free Palestine lot kick off, just say we meant Huguenots.”

Such puerile, lazy, half-cocked thinking….

Khan treats voters like distractible children. A shiny anti-hate crime poster on every platform is supposed to make us forget violence on the Tube has shot up, with 10,836 reported crimes in April to September last year compared with 6,924 in 2022. Or that knife crime is rising at its fastest rate in five years, with 40 incidents reported a day. Or that shop workers face unprecedented threats. I often find flowers and ribbons tied to a lamppost, a shrine to yet another slain young man.

London mayors do not have vast powers but at least they’re supposed to speak to and for the whole messy, nine-million-strong capital. Lacking charisma, touch or wit, Khan resorts to tick-box diversity which only accentuates difference.

Sam Bidwell at The Critic:

Much ink has already been spilled by the usual suspects about the silliness of Khan’s cringeworthy left-wing mythmaking. By now, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the mayor of our national capital has a habit of spending taxpayer money on virtue signalling. Nor should it surprise us that the left continues to trot out the same tired narratives about the Suffragettes and the Windrush Generation, both of which are little more than clumsy attempts to prove Britain’s liberal bona fides on women’s rights and immigration respectively. 

However, the Overground’s new names should worry us not merely because they are rooted in a wholly fabricated left-wing national mythology, but because they speak to a deeper rot at the heart of British culture. 

Even more unsettling than Khan’s astroturfed progressivism is the realisation that Britain has become a twee, unserious country which feels the need to tell people what it stands for. Particularly in London, we now bombard the unsuspecting public with constant reminders of what Britain is all about, as determined by a litany of faceless stakeholder committees. This is the same childish instinct that prompted Birmingham City Council to come up with street names like “Equality Road” and “Diversity Grove”, shortly before it declared bankruptcy….

It’s also remarkable how little thought has been put towards ensuring that these new monikers bear any relation to the areas that these lines serve. It is profoundly silly, for example, that the Mildmay line doesn’t run particularly close to Mildmay hospital — and what on earth do Barking and Tottenham have to do with the Suffragettes, who were famously most active in Holborn?

Update; from the Telegraph: