It could have happened to anyone. In fact, it does on a daily basis – being caught in an ‘incident’ on the tube. And this time it wasn’t a broken escalator, signal failure or any of the myriad reasons we, the travelling public, are given for being treated like cattle. I travel everyday on the tube and am sadly only too used to the usual levels of discomfort or delay,but this time I felt in real danger.

I changed from the Northern Line to the District and Circle line at Embankment. It’s a nasty, thin platform at the best of times, and the morning rush hour is certainly not the best of times. This particular day it was already extremely crowded, when another packed train drew in. After a minute or so, a voice announced that everyone must get off the train. A security incident and a small fire meant the train had to be emptied.

In fact, the platform was so full to crushing, that the twelve hundred people packed onto the train couldn’t actually all get off. The platform guard was hectoring them through the microphone: ‘the sooner you get off,the sooner the train can move out’. Faultless logic, but asking the impossible.

To make matters worse, I saw that people were still trying to come down the stairs onto the platform from the ticket hall. Nothing had been done at that point to stop even more people joining the overcrowded platform – and action was only taken when I asked the platform guard to do so. At this point, I decided for my own safety, to leave the platform via a no-entry sign and walked to my destination. It was lucky for me that I only had needed to travel one more stop.

The platform had been so crowded that at one point when the platform guard received instructions via the emergency telephone to help the driver get the doors shut, his answer to his colleagues was, ‘I can’t get to the doors. I can’t move. I can’t get down the platform’.

I telephoned the Managing Director of London Underground. My call fell on stony ground. Eventually I got an answer on his behalf from his PA. Her view was that as no one had died, everything was fine and I clearly had not understood the safety procedures put in place by the people on the ground.

I remain unconvinced. If a train has to be emptied, whatever London Underground’s emergency procedures are, I don’t believe that any platform should ever get to the point where the platform guard cannot actually move.I may be wrong – but members of the public deserve answers. I would be interested to hear from anyone who has had experiences on the tube where they felt at risk from overcrowding. Please contact me using my online surgery.

But there is also a wider issue. The Labour government still wants to push ahead with the sell-off and privatisation of parts of our tube system. You might have thought they would have learnt from the state of our railways!But even on the tube itself the warnings are already there. The Health & Safety Executive has already warned about the safety problems caused by the “shadow running” London Underground is carrying out to practice for privatisation. And if privatisation goes ahead, the private companies will be permitted to let performance standards drop by up to 5% initially.

Mayor Livingstone has made some good first steps to improve our tube system,including bringing in Robert Kiley, who sorted out the New York subway.Labour should back-off from the obsession with privatisation and let people like Kiley get on with making the tube quick, safe and reliable.