
Tomorrow's Business Today
Labour on track for a train PR nightmare
It’s nice sometimes to imagine the architects of rail privatisation stuck on a replacement bus after three cancelled trains, with no chance of getting home ‘til 3am.
They would include then prime minister John Major, dudes at the Centre for Policy Studies, all of the Adam Smith Institute and a bunch of Tory MPs.
Presumably, they mostly get chauffeured around instead, but perhaps they feel a bit sheepish when the subject of privatising trains comes up.
(They don’t. But it’s my fantasy.)
Last week this awful 30-year experiment came to a sort of end. The government’s bill to renationalise the trains became law – it has had to step in so often anyway, it might as well be official.
This is rough on Labour, since when British Rail was privatised it basically worked, or at least better than it does now.
(So did the now privatised water companies, but that’s a whole other story of sewage in Parliament and beyond.)
The privatisation of obviously national assets was an ideological solution to a problem that didn’t exist, or at least that it could not solve.
The PR problem for Labour, as if it didn’t have enough of its own making, is that it now owns this issue.
It can blame the old rail bosses and the Tories for a bit, but when Christmas trains get cancelled, these are now government controlled failures
It would be nice if the Adam Smith Institute and the rest decided it would be best now to keep quiet about how the state can’t run things properly, but that’s not how they roll.
They are interested in ideology not in outcomes.
It would also be useful if actual train experts, the nerds we laugh at until we need them, point out why the trains are a mess and call out the men responsible. (At least one woman is also to blame.)
The Adam Smith boys, they mostly are boys, would say that the problem with rail privatisation is that it didn’t go far enough.
The train companies operated a franchise for a set time: if it went well they creamed the profits, if it didn’t they just handed the keys back before the losses mounted.
They might have a point there, though they are a bit like those Marxist professors who insist that Marxism hasn’t worked only because it hasn’t been properly tried.
Another problem for Labour is that for two decades there were almost no strikes on the privatised railways as the train companies always just gave in.
From about 2016 the last government deliberately provoked strikes, from which they gained nothing apart from more consumer anger, leaving the emboldened unions to think they run the railways again (which they probably do).
The danger for the new government is that trains come to look like just something else they have failed to fix, or even made worse.
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