Off the Rails

Well, here's a fascinating fact or two: In the mid-1990s, staring electoral annihilation in the face, the government of Edwina Currie's little friend privatised the railways. It was one of the few shrewd moves by a government which, until the advent of the present one, bid fair to be ranked as the most weak-kneed, mean-spirited, small-minded and sanctimonious in living memory. Edwina Currie's little friend and his chums split up the railways into various bits - rolling stock, tracks, stations - and sold the bits to various companies, ushering in a golden age of lousy service, fatal accidents and, most importantly, considerable profiteering. One of the companies, Porterbrook, which leases trains to railway companies that don't like to be bothered with things like carriages, was sold by the Currie-cosy's government for seventy-three and a half million pounds to Charterhouse Capital Partners, who sold it to the aptly-named Stagecoach (an uncomfortable, unreliable, slow and dangerous means of transport) for eleven times as much. A parliamentary watchdog said that the taxpayer had been stiffed for nine hunded million pounds, and the Edwina-warmer and its chums were no doubt as chastened as ministers usually are by taxpayer-oriented considerations.

The privatisation was shrewd because it left the incoming Labour government with a vastly inefficient transport system which had just been made even less efficient by a vastly profitable act of sabotage. From our present perspective, eleven fed-up and disgusted years later, it is easy to forget that New Labour in 1997 were assumed to be somewhere, however slightly, to the political left of the Conservative Party. Aside from the benefits to their corporate friends, the bag-swinger and its chums hoped to make it as difficult as possible for Labour to do anything about Britain's transport system, whether by re-nationalisation (at vast expense) or reform of the private sector (which would bring forth the usual squeals of indignation from the kind of people who never have to ride on a train). The ploy failed because Tony and New Labour were no more interested in efficient public transport in 1997 than they are now; but it did mean that, particularly in the present economic climate, there is a very simple explanation for the expense, inefficiency, irrationality and general all-out Britishness of our rail system; namely: "The train-leasing business has recently been dominated by large banking groups". Says it all, really.