A FORMER Transport minister says the ongoing Tory leadership race is destroying any chance of a speedy solution to the rail dispute.

Norman Baker told GB News: “The Government has been slightly intransigent behind the scenes, the real unions are not giving as much ground as they should do on conditions.

“Some of their own companies actually are to blame because many of them have been very happy to rely on overtime from drivers, rather than employing new drivers which require them to train them at some cost. ”

“There’s no prospect of the Government giving further ground and the Government is pulling the strings behind the scenes.

“Let’s be quite clear about that, there’s no prospect of the Government giving further ground until we end up with a new cabinet because for Grant Shapps to give ground now would undermine his position within the Conservative Party I suspect.”

Meanwhile Mr Baker also hit out at Tony Blair’s call for facemasks to be made compulsory on public transport, saying the idea was “deeply unhelpful”.

“The railways are in a problem because they have got only 80% of thereabouts of pre-Covid levels of passengers,” the ex Lib-Dem MP said.

“And one of the reasons that we haven’t got 100% return is because the Government told people at the beginning that train and bus travel was unsafe – coronavirus takes the train.

“The idea that we can have mask mandates for trains without any reference to supermarkets or anything else – it’s just bonkers and to pretend that public transport is unsafe, but it’s actually totally safe to go on public transport.

“…to single out public transport at this point by Tony Blair is deeply unhelpful.”

Speaking about the rail strikes in an interview with Colin Brazier on GB News, he said the strikes have had limited impact: There isn’t the same degree of weariness. It’s partly because the strikes are one day a week or two days a week and therefore people are working around them.

“And it’s partly because the nature of transport usage has changed. We’re no longer in the days, 20 or 30 years ago when commuters turned up nine to five, Monday to Friday and when a strike occurred, they couldn’t do anything.

“Now people can work from home and leisure travel is now the growth area in rail rather than commuter traffic. Rail travel is much more optional than it used to be.”

Mr Baker added: “The danger is not that the public will get weary to the strikes so that will get some worried but the danger really is that the economics of the railway are going to be severely impacted ,that makes the opportunity to reach a sensible conclusion more difficult, because a sensible conclusion has to be that some of the outdated working practices that exist will have to be jettisoned. But I have to say that there’s no great win on either side here.”