London should loudly act against loud music on public transport

It's not just annoying, but a violation of values about shared travelling space that the city's cohesion depends on

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London is famous for being a city in which humans of great variety demonstrate every day their easy readiness to get along. That isn’t just brand messaging. It describes the lived values of the great majority. So when a minority loudly displays disregard for that consensus, it is more than simply maddening. It is a menace to the cohesion on which London’s specialness depends.

That is why action should be taken to condemn, curb and combat the behaviour of those who pollute the atmosphere on board London’s buses, trains and tubes by playing music and noisy videos out loud on their phones. There is big public support for strong measures: after the Liberal Democrats came up with their pre-elections wheeze to ban such delinquency and fine offenders up to £1,000, nearly two-thirds of Londoners in a YouGov poll supported it. Public opinion, then, is well onside. That leaves the matter of how best to make things change.

One part of that is mobilising the full range of opposition to solipsists’ assaults on the collective’s peace of mind. For some, it seems, any restraint on them is an affront to freedom and discrimination against the young. According to (ahem) a “postdoctoral prize research fellow in politics, Nuffield College (University of Oxford)” the idea of a ban is “insane boomer nonsense“. In this, he draws from the same pool of abstraction that sustains anti-vaxxers and three wise monkeys cycling activists (the latter a group in which long-titled academics are often found).

Sir Keir Starmer has a firmer grip on the ethics in play. Responding positively to his fellow London MP, Lib Dem Paul Kohler, who raised the issue at this week’s Prime Minister’s Questions, he said that this form of anti-social behaviour is “not low-level, it does affect people and their communities and their sense of safety”.

Correct. And it is not only older people who are discomfited by sonic invasions of their shared psychological spaces on the Piccadilly line or Number 38. The young, too – in some instances especially them – have reason to feel troubled by the high-volume intrusions of passengers who are either oblivious to the effect on others they are having, or are aware of it, could not give a damn and might turn nasty if you intervene.

This stuff matters. And neither shrugging nor mocking are acceptable reactions to it. That said, it is reasonably argued that laws against this sort of thing already exist and the police have more pressing priorities. So let’s make the main line of defence against such breaches of civility an upfront campaign of information to remind miscreants that that is what they are and that almost all of us wish they weren’t.

Reminding them that their conduct is illegal can add force to that approach, but the main point of the mission is persuasion. The combination has had desired effects before. One of Boris Johnson’s first acts on becoming Mayor in 2008 was to announce a ban on consuming alcohol on TfL public transport, to be supported by a poster campaign. There were complaints that this was draconian and sat oddly with Johnson’s libertarian leanings. Tube unions objected that their members’ safety might be imperilled if they tried to enforce it. But the booze ban entered public consciousness: when Diane Abbott fell foul of it in 2019, everyone pointed and she rightly apologised.

Before Johnson, London’s first Mayor, Ken Livingstone, commissioned posters urging public transport users not to spoil others’ journeys by eating smelly food on board – a sentiment sympathised with to this day – and, yes, not to disturb fellow passengers with music, though in that case the irritation in question was playing it too loudly with headphones on.

It’s not as if noise nuisance on public transport or efforts to prevent it are new. The pestilence takes other forms as well: foghorn mobile conversations, sometimes two-way ones thanks to speaker phones; blokes on trains engaged in boozy “banter”. A plague on the lot of them, I say.

In 2021, TfL launched a campaign against the sexual harassment of women on its services, an important initiative against a specific and very grave evil. Loud music and video soundtracks are, of course, less grievous transgressions. Yet they form part of the same, wider spectrum of unacceptable trespass in the confined and confining spaces we share as citizens as we travel together around the city many of us think the greatest in the world.

Our public transport network is worn and beleaguered in parts, but it is still a blessing we all share. Those who abuse that blessing in whatever way must not be permitted to prevail.