Martin Tod

Up bright and early yesterday to join the campaign to save the Romsey-Winchester rail-link bus. This entailed getting the 7.04 a.m. bus to Romsey, putting on a Santa hat, and travelling back at 7.35 a.m. with Sandra Gidley and a bus full of protesters from the Save Our Bus campaign - before collecting signatures on the concourse from local travellers. Eleanor Bell joined us as the bus came back through Hursley.

It seems hard to believe that, so soon after all the County Council’s previous bus cuts, we’d be seeing another but cut - this time from South West Trains. As with all the bus cuts so far, it puts pressure on the environment, parking and congestion and severely impacts off-peak travel for people without cars (generally pensioners and the young). In this case, it will also cause major problems for people commuting to and from London before and after peak hours. It follows on from SWT’s off-peak fare hike at the beginning of the year and the upcoming closure of the travel centre and makes a mockery of the various promises from the County and the Government to have a joined-up travel system.

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We had a great response to the University of Winchester’s Freshers’ Fair on Saturday.

Over 650 students walked out wearing ‘Scrap Tuition Fees’ stickers - and we had great support for our Youth and Student Group’s campaigns on Darfur and against homophobic bullying. We also got a good crowd of new members!

I remember campaigning against tuition fees as a student union officer in the 1980s and there was huge opposition then - and so I wasn’t too surprised when so many Winchester students responded so vigorously to our campaign.

The response was so strong that we had to reprint the petition forms after only an hour. We got nearly twice as many signatures as last year.

I know that some people think that Winchester students aren’t political (presumably people who haven’t heard of Winchester’s new Politics and Global Studies course). Our experience was quite different!