Labour should renationalise the rail industry if it wins the next election, a group of 31 prospective MPs has said.
I guess this will never really go away. At the time the railways were privatised, I objected. In the early days, that objection seemed to be justified. We had friction between the various companies as the ridiculous contracts drawn up penalised one company for the delays caused by another and money moved about – seriously ridiculous amounts of money. Even today, there is an army of trust delay attribution clerks attributing a minute’s delay here and following it like a bad smell as that train affects others and someone, somewhere gets a hefty bill.
Likewise there is conflict as we see Network Rail impose rules upon contractors that it chooses to exempt itself from – the stench of their corporate arrogance pervades the industry. So, yes, there are problems. But would I go back to BR? Well, actually, no…
Firstly, where is the money going to come from? Oh, yes, the taxpayer – including those who do not travel by train from one decade to the next. Rail travel should be paid for by those who use it, frankly. Not by those who do not – even though Network Rail is, in fact, already funded so. All of those private investors will need to be bought off. And this from an administration that left the exchequer with a note saying “all the money has gone”.
Then there is the other consideration – government cannot run a whelk stall. Sure, I have some real issues about how parts of the railway are run, but when I analyse them, it is where government is involved that these issues tend to arise. Indeed, I am currently in dispute with NSARE over their handling of a complaint – and what I find myself facing is the typical arrogance one encounters with state run or funded agencies – even though NSARE is supposed to be fully self funding by now, it remains a state monopoly.
So, on balance, the bodge job John Major gave us is probably better than having the government step in and make matters worse – because that’s what governments do – make matters worse.
The people campaigning for this use the East Coast franchise as a shining example. However, what they conveniently ignore is that GNER ran this franchise for a number of years and were paying money back to the state, such was their success, so the current model is not down to the state running it – it suggests that demographics has a part to play here.
“Rail travel should be paid for by those who use it, frankly.”
What about all those other people who *benefit* from mass transport systems? Every train and Tube and bus means hundreds – thousands – of people aren’t taking their car. Every transport artery makes London more attractive to the very businesses that make it the world city it is. *Everyone* benefits from public transport, either directly or indirectly.
Why should the fare payer also effectively subsidise others who indirectly benefit from their fare-paying?
“… – even though Network Rail is, in fact, already funded so.”
The privatised rail industry actually gets far more subsidy than British Rail ever did – the taxpayer has been pumping over £5 bn. *per year* into this “private” industry. At its worst, the most BR ever got was £2bn.
It’s been 20 years since that privatisation was done. That’s longer than it took Brunel to build the Great Western Railway, from scratch. So the government doesn’t get to play its “decades of underfunding” card any more.
Personally, I’m all in favour of privatisation, but only if there is *meaningful* competition. There is none on rail: a resident of Gravesend doesn’t get to choose to travel on a First Great Western train to St. Pancras. The British rail network has become little better than a bunch of regional monopolies. Rather than paying the profits to shareholders, why can’t the government run the network itself and cut out the middle-men?
Your notion that governments have a monopoly on arseholes is easily disproved: Last time I checked, the recent financial crash was due to the incompetence and greed of investment bankers, who were so blinded by their sleight-of-hand tricks that they didn’t see the faecal matter rapidly approaching the ventilator. Though they were clearly competent enough to avoid most of the fallout.
Enron, Worldcom, Microsoft, Google… the list of corporations run by people of dubious ethical and moral character is as long as an MP’s expenses claim. If you have a problem with HMRC wanting to sell taxpayer data to private companies, imagine what it’d be like if the HMRC were privatised and bought up by Google.
Politicians have one big disadvantage over those CEOs: We know where they live and work. We have access to them. We can force them to do what we bloody well want them to do, whether they like it or not.
That we fail to do even that is entirely a flaw in our own cultural character. It is up to us to hold these people to account and demand better standards. Our failure to do so is not an excuse to sell off the family silver to the highest bidder.
“…We can force them to do what we bloody well want them to do, whether they like it or not…”
How? pray tell – since we have been totally disarmed; they have politicised plod; they have bought huge swathes of benefits-receiving subservient supporters, and to attempt to vote them out leads to their being replaced by a facsimile of perhaps a slightly different hue.
Wat Tyler is needed.
“Why should the fare payer also effectively subsidise others who indirectly benefit from their fare-paying?”
Very simply because they choose to. They believe the cost of using the train service is offset by the benefit to themselves.
It’s how the economy works. As Adam Smith said over 20 years ago, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages.”
And if there is a strong “indirect benefit” then the market will subsidise transport. You can see this with supermarkets and shopping centres offering free buses.
There is no need for government involvement.
And that’s without going beyond your simple rhetoric and looking at other problems such as “what is not seen” and price distortion.
“There is none on rail”
You rebutted this is in your own first paragraph.
“Your notion that governments have a monopoly on arseholes is easily disproved”
LR didn’t say or even imply this. If you want to appear intelligent with your propaganda, at least be honest.
“Last time I checked, the recent financial crash was due to the incompetence and greed of investment bankers”
Check again.
Government set the incentives, bankers simply responded. What happened was inevitable and known about long before the actual crash.
Yet government did nothing to prevent it.
And by bailing out big businesses, it creates another incentive…
To quote Mises, “As a rule, capitalism is blamed for the undesired effects of a policy directed at its elimination.”.
“Politicians have one big disadvantage over those CEOs: We know where they live and work. We have access to them. We can force them to do what we bloody well want them to do, whether they like it or not.”
This is the exact opposite to the truth.
If a business wants to stay in business it needs to respond to consumers or they will go else where.
Being a violent monopoly,the government has no such concerns.
And even the government itself pays lip-service to the idea that competition produces better results than monopoly.
But it and its supporters don’t seem able to – or want to – take that truism to its logical conclusion.
Wow! I mean, just, wow! As strawmen go, that’s a beaut! Nowhere have I ever said anything like this absurd assertion. Not here, not in real life, not ever, not once.
I suggest you toddle off to Brussels and collect your CAP subsidy.
I’m really not going to bother with the rest, Andrew got there before me.
The railways are ALREADY NATIONALISED – in the sense that the twats at DafT are micro-mis-managing everything…
The Labour proposal is, apparently, to take the franchises “In-house” a la ex-LNER main line out of the Cross …
And/or to go to the very successful “Concession” model used by Merseyrail & London Overground.
IF this is the case, I’m all in favour of it.
Poor old BR would have done a wonderful job with the subsidy that the “private” companies running the services now get … ’nuff said
I can’t think how I benefit indirectly from railways creating a reduction in traffic. Most of the milage that I do is a result of my daily commute, a 22 mile round trip. There are no trains covering this journey. Interestingly, during the summer I often cycle and about half the journey is along an old disused railway line.
Precisely – “half the journey is along an old disused railway line.”
And whose fault was that?
[ And where, incidentally – was it one of the closures that should never have happened? ]
Aren’t the so-called “privatised” rail companies still heavily subsidised by the taxpayer in order to keep them afloat? Maybe not any more, so I may stand corrected, but my understanding was that the railways were nationalised back in the day because they were all, to a greater or lesser extent, in danger of going under simply because running a railway (an extremely expensive business) isn’t actually viable as a private business model without prices going through the roof (I know they’re already high, but I’m talking about 1950’s airfare levels vis-à-vis their affordability to the average Joe) which would, of course, drive away the very people for whom “public transport” is supposed to be provided. And of course, the ramifications of a major train company going belly-up would be massive – look at the hoo-hah we have when there’s only one day of strikes on the tube – so they were nationalised in order to prevent that situation from arising. As the business model (and its poor viability) hasn’t changed, hence the need for ongoing huge taxpayer-funded subsidies.
Maybe I’ve got that wrong and it was good old-fashioned rampant Labour idealism at work. But either way, as a passenger, I’ve certainly not seen much by way of improvement on the trains since privatisation, although in fairness I haven’t seen much by way of deterioration in service, either, apart from the fact that the platform staff seem less numerous and the ones that there are don’t seem to be as massively knowledgeable as they were in the days of British Rail (“Next train to Oxford? Platform 3 in five minutes; change at Reading”)
The biggest problem of course (apart from the complete lack of money of course – but Labour will just borrow that and add to the National Debt), is that I couldn’t trust this Government – or the opposition either – to tie their own shoelaces without getting it wrong, so how the hell do they think they have a hope in hell of running an entire rail network? As with all things to do with politicians, my default position these days is “Yes, it might be a good idea to do x or y or z, but under you lot, we’d be better struggling on with what we’ve got, thanks, because although you are utterly incapable of making anything, ever, any better, you are eminently capable of making it a whole lot worse.”
GNER managed it. When they had the franchise, they were paying money back to the exchequer.