Railways are too important to run on greed

In the novel Catch 22, one of the central characters is an entrepreneurial war profiteer by the name of Milo Minderbinder. Caught swindling his fellow countrymen, Milo evokes the “historic right of free men to pay as much as they have to for the things they need in order to survive”. When Milo’s profiteering results in the price of food in the army mess hall climbing so high that the enlisted men can no longer afford to eat, Milo valiantly cites the alternative. And since he is an unapologetic champion of the free-market, the alternative is for the enlisted men to exercise their freedom of choice and “choose” starvation.

The twisted logic of Milo Minderbinder reached the summit of political power in Britain under the Conservative government of the 80s and 90s. Public services were given away at knock down prices to a private sector which, it was assumed as a matter of course, could always run things better than workers or the state. The last significant privatisation before the Conservatives lost power to New Labour in 1997 was British Rail, which was split up and sold off in 1994. The logic of the market dictated, after all, that if you didn’t like how a company ran a service you could choose, of your own free will, not to use it. Privatisation engendered choice, so it was said. And like the men in Milo Minderbinder’s mess hall, if you didn’t like that you could take your money, exercise your freedom of choice and, well, go and live in the woods or something.

Only on the pages of Atlas Shrugged could life be that simple. The real-world consequences of rail privatisation were huge profits for fat cat bosses, large dividends for shareholders and enormous price hikes for passengers. Today in Britain some of the highest train fares in Europe co-exist alongside some extremely low rates of electrification and embarrassingly shoddy services. Despite ten years of above-inflation rail price increases, which have left some in the south-east spending 15 per cent of their salary on rail travel (usually, perversely, on trains to get them to and from the place where they earn that salary), the cost of supporting the rail network is much greater today than it was before the dissolution of British Rail. In 2010/11, Network Rail was subsidised by the taxpayer to the tune of £3.96 billion. This compares with an average of £1.4billion over the 10 years leading up to privatisation. In light of the expected 6 per cent increase in fares, 10 per cent of commuters say they will no longer be able to afford to travel by train when new prices kick in.

Sir Richard Branson is apparently “furious” at what he called the “insane choice” of rival FirstGroup to run the profitable West Coast Main line. FirstGroup bid £5.5bn, more than double Virgin’s existing payments, leading to fears that FirstGroup will cut staff, scrap services and push up fares to meet its obligations when it takes over in December. Squabbling over who the contract was awarded to misses the point, however. And Mr Branson would say that, wouldn’t he? Happy to move Virgin’s brand division to Switzerland to save the company millions in tax revenue, Virgin Rail has in the past depended heavily on state money and been the subject of a large number of passenger complaints.

The rail network epitomises the grotesque idea of private gain and public loss that only a few years ago left taxpayers picking up the bill after the banks crashed. Just as the government could not let banks that were “too big to fail” go under, so it cannot permit the companies that run our trains to fail because the consequences would be too severe. For rather obvious reasons, the rail network cannot be turned off for a few days based on the crackpot idea of letting the market run its course. And so the train companies resemble a compulsive gambler placing bets with somebody else’s money. The grotesque result is a parody whereby profits go to fat cats while the tab for bad business practice will always, come what may, be picked up by the taxpayer.

If recent opinion polls are anything to go by, over half the British public would support full nationalisation of the railways. Even Conservative supporters appear to have abandoned at least a small portion of the failed dogma of the 1980s, with a majority saying they would prefer nationalisation to the current shambles. The only thing that appears to be stopping the political class taking action and bringing the railways back under public ownership is blind faith in an ideology which looks increasingly incompatible with a civilised way of life: public bad, private good. Karl Marx once said that the tradition of all dead generations “weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living”. Whatever you think of the great man, it does not take a communist to recognise that a capitalist rail network is both tragedy and farce mixed with an unmistakable stench of greed.

Picture credit: Getty

Recent Posts on Notebook

• Barking Blondes: When to vaccinate
• Enslaved to maize: Why we need to re-think Malawi's agricultural future
• The real ghetto superstar: Why Floyd Mayweather is no Muhammad Ali
• The fight for social equality in Brazil
• Barking Blondes: Other people's dogs

• http://www.facebook.com/people/Sue-Booth/734342597 Sue Booth

  Some people are happy with very low standards it seems.

• http://www.facebook.com/people/Sue-Booth/734342597 Sue Booth

  Or just plain stupid

• Ian C. Purdie – Sydney

  Oh my God! And we’re talking about potential re-nationalisation of railways?
  We’ll be labelled pinko, socialists. Worse? Dirty, rotten commie enemies.
  The poster said: “This author is a complete ignoramus”. Well I think the author got it right about free-marketeers: “entrepreneurial war profiteer by the name of Milo Minderbinder” The pin up of the USA.
  Wasn’t Milo Minderbinder once a CEO for Halliburton or did they just learn from him?

• Ian C. Purdie – Sydney

  And if you work in Paddington for example? Last time I was there 22 years ago you would be SOL for all day parking.
  Further, the smart money says get people out of cars and into public transport.
  OH! Back in 1990 the tube and other rail networks blew Sydney away.

• catmocca

  I live in shropshire, there was a train from Wrexham and Shropshire line that ran to London from Shrewsbury for £40, it had 99.9% customer satisfaction, but was pulled because virgin would;t let them use any stations they used, so it could;t pick up in birmingham, so what was granted in the privatisation was a monopoly on routes, how can this ever work, the idea of privatisation is competition, if that is forbidden, then its bound to fail.
  It costs me £131 one way for peak time to london now.
  What sticks in my throat even more, is after years of paying this rip of fair, I discover, by splitting my ticket at 2 or 3 stops (without leaving the train) I can actually do a peak time return to london for £60 less then the off peak ticket. I’m absolutely disgusted in this practice, if you ask for the cheapest fair, then you should get it, currently you have to research it for youself (google train tickets splits for some sites to help with this) its much like the miss selling of insurance etc that all the corporate bodies seem to like to do to maximise profits with no conscience for their customers.
  IMO we either nationalise the rail system, or let the privateers pay for it all, with no government subsidies, when they fail we can nationalise rail for nothing. Why are taxpayers subsiding corporate profits on a monopolised industry? True competition would require actual choice, i.e multiple companies on the same route, rather than west coast goes to corporate shill no.1 east to shill no.2

• http://0xf.nl antihero

  And schools, law enforcement, and parliament!

• Marc Bossiere

  Yes. Think how we feel here in the USA.. Privatized health care, prisons, nothing is off limits! Maybe Britain will set an example by reversing this idiotic practices. MB, Tucson AZ

• GwendolenMeiMeiWilliams

  I believe it was a Virgin train that shut the doors and drove away as I was attempting to help a disabled, elderly lady get on the train after being pushed out of the way by a large man in a suit. All this with a Virgin representative casually observing before waving the train to carry on.