The remarkable story of Fare Dodgers' Liberation Front and their fight for free public transport

Got no money to travel the London Underground? Sick of being crowded on trains and overcharged for the privilege? Think public transport should be free for all, all the time? Feel like not paying? You’re not alone – join the Fare Dodgers’ Liberation Front! Let’s peer into history.

London, 1990s. A massive city where travel was expensive; for people on benefits or low pay, paying your way was out of people’s reach. Lots of people thought public transport should be cheaper – or even free. But campaigning for free travel is one thing. Some of us were determined to just take it for ourselves. 

Until the early 1990s, fare-dodging was widespread and culturally normal: thousands would ‘jump’ the tube or bus. And it was easy – few stations had barriers and many transport workers couldn’t care less. Old Routemaster buses with ticket collectors were tricky, but you could get thrown off without a ticket, then get the next bus.   

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This was pre-Oyster, pre-digital, before debit cards were travel passes. You bought paper tickets or travelcards for a day or week’s travel.  

A portfolio of tricks for not paying existed. The gradual introduction of barriers on the underground was still incomplete. If your local station had a gate, the next on the line often didn’t. If athletic, you could leap the gates but this attracted attention; slipping quickly behind someone else when they put their ticket through was less obvious. It’s a fine art: if you’re smooth sometimes the person in front never realises. Other times they do. Cue either a sympathetic grin, or an outraged, ”Why should you travel free while I pay!?!” Gate-crashing is still widespread today, though it’s harder. Then, barriers weren’t everywhere. You might only have to dodge through behind someone once on a journey. 

You could also not pay full price. You could buy travelcards secondhand outside stations for a quid (supporting street homeless people who often resold them). Some people would give theirs away. Flash an old travelcard at a guard too quick for them to read it. One-day travelcards bought in newsagents with a rubberstamped date could be used for two days’ travel if employed subtly. Eat your heart out Martin Lewis! 

All this was costing London Underground millions. In 1994 they tried to reduce fare-dodging by bringing in ‘penalty fares’. Anyone caught travelling without a ticket, or on the wrong ticket, by one of the Underground’s ticket inspectors (operating in plain clothes), would be fined £10 on the spot. 

However, there were loopholes in this system, and hardened fare-dodgers caught on pretty quickly. Some of us set out to publicise them, encourage dodging, muck up the system. The Fare Dodgers’ Liberation Front (FDLF), in South London, and the Fare Dodgers’ Underground (North London), were born. We were tiny groups, not representative of the thousands of fare-dodgers, not trying to be – just agitating, stirring the pot. 

The FDLF pointed out that inspectors demanding penalty fares really had few legal powers. The law introducing fines only meant a person unwilling or unable to pay on the spot had to provide a name and address. The inspector couldn’t arrest you, demand proof of identity or detain you. If you refused to pay they could only call cops (not always practical), or send you a demand to pay by post/summon you to court. There were many good excuses for not having a ticket: a ticket window with a long queue, a ticket machine that won’t give change. Maybe you lost your ticket. Bullshitting your way out often worked. 

We spread thousands of stickers and leaflets around the tubes; guides to how to dodge fares and sound reasons why. When London Underground put up posters trying to scare or embarrass people into not dodging (harping on the shame of being caught and the criminal record you could get from arrest), we subverted them, nicking adverts, converting them, encouraging fare avoidance and then put them back on trains. A poster of shop dummies reading ‘don’t be a dummy, pay your fare’, was changed to ‘we’re squashed together like dummies and made to pay for the pleasure’. 

Some of the best sticker ideas were thought up in the pubs around Brixton and Clapham. We’d get pissed and chuck ideas around: ‘Why should others pay while we travel free?’ (a spoof on the anti-fare dodging ‘why should some people travel free while most pay their way’); ‘Stop the barbaric Trade in Live Commuters’ (referencing the then huge campaign against live animal exports); ‘Can’t pay! Won’t Pay!’ – also ‘Can Pay! Won’t Pay!’ 

We targeted ticket machines and barriers. Another FDLF sticker read ‘General Ludd Says Smash this Machine!’ reviving 19th century Luddite campaigns against machinery that undercut their wages. Getting through the barriers without a ticket became a challenge. Our posters claimed four people could get through in one go when they opened (possibly optimistic!). We spread the word about sensors on the machine you could cover with your hand to make a gate stay open longer, and that chewing gum could be used to jam up ticket machines… 

FDLF also proposed free travel on all tubes, trains and buses (and free toilets on train and tube station platforms!)  

As a fun way of getting the message out we decided to hold parties on the Circle Line, a great place for a moving shindig. In May 1995, 30 of us boarded a tube train with balloons, booze, stickers and leaflets and held a mini-festival, dancing through the train and drinking, handing out stickers and freesheets.  

After the success of this party, we tried again a month later, but fewer people turned up. News of the party reached the transport police, who swarmed the festivities, arresting two partygoers for carrying stickers. One was charged with ‘Possessing advertising stickers with intent to something or other’ and fined. Tube party protests don’t work unless you’ve got the numbers. 

The funniest aspect of the whole agitation showed our (shortlived) impact. If you were caught fare dodging but claimed to have no cash for an immediate fine, inspectors (having no power to detain you), made you fill out a yellow slip with a name and address, how much you were supposed to owe, which they would then demand by post. The weak link in this was that you could easily give a false name. They could check the address EXISTED, but not who lived there, so a real address was useful.

The FDLF publicised this, and MAY have suggested that people use a creative false name and OUR postal address: the 121 anarchist squat centre in Brixton, which some of us FDLFers were involved in running. Over the next few years, a deluge of yellow slips arrived at 121 by post, addressed to a variety of interesting names, demanding money from folk with no intention of ever paying their fines. 

The penalty for being caught dodging went up to £20 a few years later; because the £10 fine failed to cut non-payment. 

The actual strength of fare-dodging was that it was widely culturally acceptable, and an economic necessity. Our campaign wasn’t part of any wider movement, it was just some anarchists doing pranks, although for a laugh we pretended we were bigger and more organised than we were. We called ourselves a Liberation Front to poke fun at leftist micro-groups with five members proclaiming themselves the Workers International. 

Our calls for a mass fare evasion resistance movement were optimistic. Fare-dodging is an individual act. A mass movement that could have reversed the crackdown would have been hard to build, and minuscule groups of activists were never going to be the catalyst. 

Around this time, numerous social survival techniques were being repressed, part of a long-term readjustment of UK social relations, eliminating many dodges, closing down ways we made livings ducking and diving, evolved over time. Making two dole claims, working on the side while signing on, squatting, etc, all was being squeezed. Resistance was sporadic on a lot of these questions, as with fare-dodging: many people accepted that scams were shortlived, loopholes bound to be closed and moved on to new fiddles.  

Culturally, fare-dodging gradually became less openly acceptable as a narrower mindset spread in society – another story… 

London Underground eventually reduced tube dodging. Penalty fares and more barriers gradually cut resistance. But it went on in new arenas. Bendy buses were basically free if you avoided inspectors; the new Routemasters are dodgeable if you’re nifty. Fare-dodging on the tube still goes on – the ‘dash through the gates behind someone’ trick still works. The needy are out there travelling for free. They evolve new methods. 

It’s possible the use of personal payment cards for tube and other transport effectively decriminalises fare-dodging. If you manage to start a journey without tapping your card (no barriers, barriers open etc) and an inspector catches you, all you have to do is to show a valid debit/credit card – they have no right to accuse you of fraud or impose a fine, they can only charge you the fare for your journey.

More than 100 cities in the world have given up collecting fares at all. Fare Free is a pressure group campaigning for all travel to be made free in London. For more on the short history of the Fare Dodgers Liberation Front, see ‘Why Pay?’ a pamphlet from Past Tense.

Written by a former member of the Fare Dodgers Liberation Front.  

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