THE UK RAIL RIP-OFF: PART 2 – PRIVATISATION PROFITEERS RIDE THE RAILS (AT YOUR EXPENSE)

In the previous post: UK Rail Rip-Off:Coming off the Rails, ANDY FLEMING looked at how our once great national railway system that was the envy of the world, was butchered by politicians obsessed with imposing free market disciplines on a strategic national monopoly. In this post he takes a look at the Tories' half baked, inefficient, horrendously expensive and disastrous privatisation experiment with our railways.

You can always detect a political zealot. They are just like religious zealots and fundamentalists. The very last thing any of them can be bothered to do is learn any facts about the particular area they rant about. And I don't mind, I'm all for freedom of speech, just so long as they don't wreck our industries and economy or blow up aeroplanes. But that's just what's been happening to the British economy over the last four or five decades.

It has of course been an agenda dominated by right wing libertarian politics that has espoused an age old doctrine first propounded by Adam Smith and his "hidden hand" in his tome The Wealth of Nations. Like a hydra that keeps having its tentacles amputated, its philosophies of deregulation, "rolling back the state", and the wholesale privatisation of strategic state natural monopolistic industries just keep growing back.

The same old tired policies practiced right up to 1945 keep getting trotted out in every new generation of right wing politicians. They regard them as panaceas to every conceivable societal ill. It took an 'Old Labour' government led by Clement Attlee to civilise Britain, to legislate against children being sent up chimneys or down mines or becoming illiterate adults. Centuries of Adam Smith's free markets had failed to provide even a meagre standard of living for the majority of the population. The whole ideology was and still is just an excuse for individual greed masquerading as a political and economic ideology.

In just a few a few short years following VE day thanks to collective state intervention, Britain gained a socialised health care and education system, a Welfare State, socialised housing and the nationalisation of decrepit and rundown yet vital and strategic monopolistic industries including steel, coal and the railways. Such is the nature of global capitalism however, that even in the fifties a civilised society meant a society in which wage, safety and environmental protection costs were higher. Corporations and international capital always on the lookout for a workforce and a nation to exploit started to relocate their sweat shops run with slave labour to places such as Hong Kong and Japan.

It wasn’t long before the worsening balance of payments and trade deficits were being blamed on workforce laziness, unionisation, wages, infact everything under the sun as long as that didn’t include archaic British management practices or an early sixties Macmillan government led by a bunch of politicians like Profumo who epitomised the word sleaze.

Nationalised industries bore brunt of much of the blame and especially Britain’s railways. Nationalised in 1948 out of desperation resulting from decades of private company neglect, the “Big Four” railway companies (London Midland Scottish, Great Western Railway, London and North Eastern Railway and Southern Railways) became united and nationalised as British Railways.

THE UK RAIL RIP-OFF: PART 1 - COMING OFF THE RAILS

The end of the line? After decades of neglect and funding cuts, by the late eighties much of Britain's once great national railway network was starting to look like this. Even worse, a large proportion of route mileage was already gone thanks to the infamous Beeching Cuts of the sixties, most of which were executed by a Labour government.

In a regular series of posts ANDY FLEMING takes a look at our non-integrated and not fit for purpose public transport system. He starts by taking a recent historical look at the UK’s railway system, one of the most expensive in Western Europe for both passengers and taxpayers. It isn’t long before corrupt politicians are seen to be taking the public for a ride along the rails.

They say that travel broadens the mind, and foreign travel especially. I was a late starter in getting “the bug” for it. In fact it was on our honeymoon in August 1989 in Paris that I first set foot on foreign soil. And as a graduate student of sociology with modules in transport and planning what a shock it was.

We arrived in Paris via train, to me the most civilised form of mass transport, at Gare du Nord. The journey had been a real eye opener. We had travelled all of the way by train from Darlington, enjoying an overnight stay in central London and then using the ferry for the short crossing to Boulogne (this was before the Channel Tunnel of course).

Nothing remarkable in this, but on a personal level, visiting France for the first time was a big event in my life. At the age of twenty nine I had previously developed the view that everything about our country was best. Its education, health care, welfare, and other state systems and infrastructure were at the apex of civilisation.

My first footsteps on to the Société Nationale des Chemins de fer Français (SNCF) express train shattered this UK-centric worldview. Clearly, before I had even tested a word of my pigeon French out on an unsuspecting local person, this wasn’t just a journey of discovery in terms of culture, society and country; it was a tale of two completely different national railway systems, and it would be a comparison in which Britain would inevitably come out a very poor loser. Bear in mind too our journey was at the time TransManche Link (TML) were still excavating the Channel Tunnel, Eurostar trains were still a couple of years in the future.

On time we left Boulogne and travelled through the beautiful countryside of northern France at high speed on our way to the nation’s capital. We were seated inside a second class compartment, but it appeared to both my wife Gill and myself to be perfect luxury. In fact, we had initially inadvertently mistaken our coach as being first class and we might be reprimanded for sitting there. Our worries soon abated on a walk down the train to enjoy the delights and service of a fully stocked restaurant and buffet car. That’s because first class was even more luxurious. This was first class travel with a second class ticket. Through Amiens and on to Paris we were whisked to pull into Gare du Nord on time to the second. This was how rail travel should be, I thought.