Comments on this site and elsewhere have focused on who should take credit for what is quite a special result. I think we should be focusing on what went right and why this was such a success. People might be interested in some detail on this story. The large part of the credit for all of this should go to 2 groups. Firstly the Friends of Rose Hill station, who instigated the whole campaign. They alerted people and with the tremendous help from the Friends groups at Marple and Romiley, along with the GVRUA, got other people involved, gained the support of influential people and groups, wrote letters, planned campaigns, press and publicity and, crucially marshalled the facts to prove that Northern’s arguments were flawed. This group was also responsible for developing the 90 minutes service solution, with the full detail of a worked up timetable that was ultimately adopted by Northern. The idea came from the combined friends groups, no one else. During the campaign, some groups joined the bandwagon without ever notifying or involving the Friends, some influential individuals failed to deliver on meetings and others wrote to the Friends group to say they’d tried but progress was impossible. Despite this, the Friends never gave up and as a group of volunteers they should be treasured by our community.
No one has highlighted the background that allowed the Marple Area committee to call an extraordinary meeting. This used an arcane part of the council constitution which gave powers to call Northern to account and allowed the Friends groups and local councillors to question them in public - the only time this happened - and reveal their arguments flew in the face of facts and data. This undermined Northern’s approach and skilfully brought in TfGM as experts to discredit Northern for their failure to consider a range of reasonable alternatives. The basis of this meeting came from a part of the Constitution that has never been used before. I know how it was found and how it was developed, and that the council didn’t know how to structure the meeting initially and who advised them how to do it. This meeting ended with admittedly a rather bizarre solution but not without precedent. As a trained professional negotiator in my past I know that if you want to leverage an alternative plan you have to be prepared to carry it through and show that you’ve done the work to do so. At the time of Northern’s U-turn the meeting had used its powers to get council officers engaged with Northern, TfGM and the rail operators to talk about how a plan developed by a small group of amateurs was going to do what Northern couldn’t, despite all their expertise and resources.
In making the U-turn the government Rail Minister was factually incorrect in some of the things he said. He failed to research the correspondence received by his boss Grant Shapps the Transport Minister. This included a letter from 11 local Lib Dem councillors which received a full reply from Grant Shapps. The Rail minister is not the first who has presented incorrect information in justifying a U-turn. He missed other contacts by local councillors too, an error which was maybe more understandable if he didn't understand local structures, but made the depth of his untruths even worse. Those people who have chosen to circulate these false assertions, without checking, have proved the truth of the adage “a lie is halfway around the world before the truth has got its boots on“. This incident has also proved the adage a victory has 1000 parents whereas a defeat is an orphan.
The second group that deserves credit for this success is the people of Marple. Around an eighth of the total population of our town signed the Lib Dem petition but more importantly took the trouble to write to MPs, Ministers, the Manchester Mayor, TfGM and generally register their articulate, reasoned objections. Our community of residents should be proud to have proved that a passionate justified and well-organised campaign can overturn a Government decision. That should be celebrated.
