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Star Comment: Who will end rail madness?

TRANSPORT unions are once again accused by the government of “irresponsible scaremongering” for daring to tell the truth about the state of Britain’s privately operated railways.

“Safety is the number one priority for all operations on the railway,” states an anonymous Department for Transport spokesman, as though simply saying it makes it so.

Authorising privateers to reduce numbers of safety-critical staff on trains and in stations does not encourage confidence in the spokesman’s cosy words.

It rather confirms that the real number one priority of the private consortiums handed new franchises for about a third of England’s passenger network is boosting profits and shareholder dividends as quickly as possible.

The Tories, who initially privatised our railways two decades ago, still claim that the private sector can run this major industry more efficiently than a publicly owned company.

This flies in the face of the experience of the East Coast Main Line, which has been run successfully by Directly Operated Railways subsidiary East Coast and will return an expected £900 million to the Treasury by next year.

In contrast, the privately operated consortiums, which include state-owned companies from France, Germany and the Netherlands, attract annual taxpayer subsidies of £1.2 billion.

Public rail networks in other European states are able therefore to use profits gained in Britain by dint of taxpayer subsidies to invest in their own development.

If schoolchildren were asked to choose between a model that cost the Exchequer over a billion pounds each year and another delivering an annual surplus, they would have no difficulty making the correct choice.

But not our politicians. They cannot envisage any economic model that does not have private profit at its heart. Both parliamentary front benches overact to convey the idea of sharp political conflict over their attitude to the railways, but their hearts aren’t in it.

Labour has not recovered from the days when Tony Blair and Gordon Brown took the Tory privatisation programme on board lock, stock and barrel.

Public opinion, as Tony Benn often pointed out, is far in advance of the Labour leadership, seeing the clear need to take our railways back into public ownership.

Faced with an open goal, Ed Miliband gets flustered, stutters and waffles rather than shatter the unity of the front benches in support of “private good, public bad” economic orthodoxy.

The Labour leader is clearly rattled by the Tory claim that his suggestion of a minimal element of rent control for private tenants equates to emulating Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolution.

Does he fear comparison with Fidel Castro if he backs a policy that is eminently sensible, affordable and wildly popular?

Green MP Caroline Lucas did the job that should have come naturally to Miliband, attending a TUC
Action for Rail protest at London’s Victoria station and making comments that a Labour leader should have made.

Lucas pointed out that Britain’s privatised and fragmented rail services are unreliable and have some of the most expensive fares in Europe.

The government “should accept that privatisation has clearly failed and gradually return the railways into public ownership,” she declared.

If Miliband uttered similar sentiments, he might well upset his new best mate and Sun proprietor Rupert Murdoch. However, he would enthuse millions of disaffected Labour voters, rail users, trade unionists and taxpayers tempted to believe that differences between the major parliamentary parties might be more than cosmetic.

 

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