The biggest story of the week is that the Rwanda bill has finally passed through Parliament. Rejoice!
Apparently the first flights have already been booked. However, Michael O’Leary, CEO of budget airline Ryanair, has said the government have not approached him to take migrants to Rwanda aboard a Ryanair plane. This is slightly concerning. Let’s hope we aren’t paying an arm and a leg to put them all on an Emirates flight with quilted leather seats, plush carpets and Bollinger champagne. A budget flight will do.
So, the big news story of the week is the take off of the Rwanda plan. But I’m not writing about it.
This week, my weaponised quill is being directed at a very different form of transport to aeroplanes. And that is, the train.
The railways in Great Britain have been a complete problem child. For two years, we’ve had strike after strike, disruption after disruption and – even worse than that – speech after speech from RMT Union Leader Mick Lynch.
The Labour Party, who are already going into the imminent general election as polling favourites, have said they have the solution for Britain’s railway woes. They claim that renationalising the railways is the way forward – and Shadow Transport Secretary Louise Haigh has said it will happen within the next five years.
This is a rather bold claim. Firstly, it assumes Labour will win the election. In politics, nothing is ever a done deal until it is done. And even then, it isn’t completely done. If Labour do win, the Rwanda bill that has finally become a ‘done deal’ will probably be scrapped anyway. We may well see Louise Haigh with several large eggs on her face if Labour suffers an electoral flop.
But enough of the pernickety nit-picking. Are there actually grounds to renationalise rail or not?
The get-out-of-jail-free answer is ‘potentially’. The main sticking point for private companies is that they get accused of profiteering. A 2013 study found a London to Manchester ticket has risen by 208% since privatisation. Rail fares increased by 5.7% in March 2023 alone, suggesting the price hikes have only continued. And of course, the top directors for each company receive a ludicrously high average salary of £300,000.
So far, then, renationalisation looks like a good option. We’re paying more for our train tickets – and that money seems to be landing straight in the pockets of directors and company profits. Meanwhile, some trains run up and down this country in the 21st-century without a charging socket, and most of them have seats somehow less comfortable than a church pew. And that’s even assuming the damned thing arrives on time – or at all, if there’s a leaf on the track.
The other thing I cannot understand about our privatised rail companies is the point of having a choice between one company and another. This is because you have no choice.
I would consider LNER the hallmark railway company in Britain – particularly their Azuma trains, which have plush red seats that make your insides gooey with relaxation. But LNER do not run their trains everywhere, so I remain stuck with Greater Anglia’s geographical monopoly. The element of choice simply isn’t there because you cannot move a railway, and not every company can operate on every line because you’d end up with a more complicated logistical nightmare than the infamous Spaghetti Junction in Birmingham.
This looks like a troubling cocktail of high prices, high profits, poor quality services, and a total lack of consumer choice – the supposed great benefit of privatisation. But we haven’t reached the end of the story just yet.
Most defenders of privatised rail immediately flock to criticising British Rail – the nationalised company that operated from 1948 to 1997. British Rail trains were dirty, slow and never on time, they say. Perhaps there is some validity in this point, but it was probably down to underinvestment by several governments.
A much more important rebuttal to this whole renationalisation debacle is quite simply this. It will not make a spit of difference. Our rail services could be run by the government, private companies, Lord Sugar, or aliens on Mars – no matter who it is, the result would be exactly the same.
This is because the problem with our railways is not who runs them, but what they run on – outdated Victorian tracks. Not to mention the fact that there are 4,000 miles of disused or abandoned railway tracks across Britain.
Google a ‘now and then’ comparison of Britain’s railways. We used to have so many railway lines traversing our country that I genuinely don’t know where we put them all. They must’ve run through people’s houses. Compare that to now, where the map looks so blank that you could park a bus in the gaping holes in our railway connections.
The supply of track space just isn’t there for railway companies – of state or private ownership – to run enough trains to cope with the demand. There have consistently been around 1.7 billion UK rail passenger journeys a year over the past decade, with the exception of the pandemic year. It is simply a case of demand outweighing supply, meaning fares will inevitably go up.
It’s for this reason that Labour’s decision to jump on the renationalisation bandwagon will not work. It does not matter who is running the trains – unless you are going to invest in better railway infrastructure, or reopen some of the disused lines.
You may notice I have spent a lot more time criticising the privatised rail companies as they are, rather than criticising Labour’s plans. This is because I sympathise with the frustration. I, too, despise paying in the region of £60 for one ticket into London, when our European counterparts in Germany pay €49 a month for unlimited train travel.
But renationalising the railways is not the answer. Nothing will help, except reigniting the flame of Victorian ingenuity to upgrade and reopen disused railways. Until someone actually realises this is the heart of the issue, we can all watch in dismay as our Great British railway network grinds to a disappointing halt.
Image: MetalFusion81
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