THE RAIL TRUTH
The public has shown remarkable for- bearance this Christmas. At the very moment when public transport is essential, the rail network has gone into self-induced spasm. Families are driven on to the roads, while the bureaucrats from Railtrack con- tinue their hysterical and meticulous exca- vations. Passengers invited to board a train find themselves sitting motionless for long intervals while the engines churn, until at once the lights go off, and — though no announcement is made — everyone under- stands by instinct that the service will not after all be departing.
Throughout these hardships people have heroically refused to succumb to the temp- tation to do the natural thing, and to blame John Prescott and the rest of the Labour government, who, one might have thought, bore some share of the responsibility after four years in power. In fact, such is the level of Blitz-spirit and stiff-upper-lip that the Great Travelling Public would rather blame almost everyone except the government. They blame the greedy fat cats of Railtrack, who, so they believe, have put profits before safety. But at the most basic level they blame the Tories for what is widely accepted to have been a botched, greedy and possibly downright evil decision to pri- vatise the railways, Which is one of the rea- sons the Conservative party staggers into the election year with its poll ratings still flickering on 32 per cent, and why Tony Blair, more slippery than a greased piglet, shrugs off the blame for the most compre- hensive failure of transport policy in mod- ern history. How is it that the Tories have copped the rap for the rail crisis, when they handed over responsibility in May 1997? Is the pub- lic right to show Labour such amazing clemency? Or are we all victims of a partic- ularly remorseless strategy of disinforma- tion'? The public is not entirely mistaken in its prejudices, in the sense that anyone involved in railways will confirm that there has been chronic under-investment, by all governments, over the last 40 years. Some
date the Treasury's disillusion to 1955,
when the taxpayer was called upon to fund a very expensive conversion to diesel. Since then, when faced with a choice between, say, restricting nurse's pay or cutting rail-
way investment, ministers have unerringly budgeted for the short-term. That changed, of course, when the railways were priva- tised in 1996, and investment was no longer restricted to what the PSBR would bear. This year, for instance, Railtrack has raised £2.5 billion on the markets when indepen- dent analysts, such as Nigel Harris of Rail Magazine, believe that the old British Rail would have received half as much from cen- tral government.
It is true that the railways have seemed unbearably crowded, but that is for a good reason. Here is a fact that ought to astonish those who reflexively believe that railway privatisation was nothing more than the final and lamentable fit of mad Thatcherite dogma. It is a fact you will not hear from the lips of John Prescott, whose approach to the railways under his nominal tutelage has been just to attack them as a 'national disgrace'. That fact is that passenger rail travel has risen by a quarter since privatisa- tion, and freight travel by almost as much. in other words, railway privatisation, assessed on the simplest criterion, has been a triumphant success.
Far more people use the privatised rail- ways. Partly, to be fair, this is because of the Prescottian policy of under-investment in the roads. Partly it is because fares have been held down; but we should surely not rule out the most obvious explanation, which is that privatisation has had some benefits which go almost completely unac- knowledged. It has allowed enterprising heads of train operating companies to lay on more services, and to invest in up-to- date trains. Whatever we think about the veracity of performance figures, they at least appear to show that every year since privatisation has been better than every year before privatisation. There have been three serious accidents in the last three years, but the overall number of derail- ments and collisions has been falling every year. The recent collapse has been brought about not so much by Tory under-invest- ment, but a demented over-reaction to Hat- field which Labour has done nothing to correct.
What is astonishing is not so much that all this is true, in other words that it is per- fectly possible to make the case that privati-
sation, for all its flaws, was essentially bet- ter than public ownership. What is aston-
ishing is that nobody does make this case, and that if any Tory were to go on Question Time and say this, there would be derisive hoots from the audience. It is as though Labour had decided deliberately to run the railways down (did not Blair say, in his first Cabinet meeting, that they were 'not a pri- ority'?), not increasing the subsidy in line with greater use, in the knowledge that the public would instinctively blame the Tories.
We are now perhaps four months from an election. The Tories are not in power, and
have not been for years. The government is responsible for the railways. They must not be allowed to get away with it.
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