LABOUR’S renewed pledge to extend public ownership of Britain’s railway network is broadly to be welcomed.
Shadow transport secretary Louise Haigh has done well to stand up to pressure from Labour’s pro-business hard right to water down or abandon the plans.
It represents a rare example of Keir Starmer not cynically abandoning the pledges on which he won the Labour leadership election in 2020. Promises to take back into public ownership energy and water utilities have long since been abandoned to appease the City.
Labour’s proposal is to take the train operating franchises back into public hands as and when their present contracts run out. All of them come up for renewal in the next four years, so a full-term Labour government should see them all state run.
This will surely have benefits for passengers in terms of the integration of services and the simplification of ticketing, two issues which the privatised industry has repeatedly promised to address and just as repeatedly failed to.
It will also save money better invested in the network by ending payments to private shareholders, who have been milking the system introduced by John Major throughout.
Nevertheless, this is no act of radicalism. Even under the Tories, four of the train operating franchises are presently state-run because of failures by private operators.
Network Rail, which owns the infrastructure, is already publicly owned and the present government has proposed establishing Great British Railways to direct the industry as a whole, even if it has slow-walked implementation and endeavoured to maintain a big role for private capital.
And there can be little doubt that if ending rail privatisation was going to cost the Exchequer a penny, then shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves would have vetoed it.
The proof is in the holes remaining in Labour’s plans. For one thing, the rolling stock companies (Roscos), which own the trains themselves, are to remain in private hands.
Of all those who have profited obscenely from 30 years of rail privatisation, the Roscos are the most egregious. Mainly controlled by financial institutions, they have delivered eye-watering returns to their shareholders.
It seems they will be able to continue to do so under Labour, even though they will have ultimately only one customer for the great bulk of their assets — Great British Railways.
Given the present chaos over railway procurement, with unnecessary gaps in orders allowed to compromise the future of Britain’s train-building industry, this is bad news. RMT is right to urge a rethink on this.
Likewise, rail freight is to remain in private hands, since it does not operate on a franchise basis. Getting more goods moving by rail rather than road is an environmental imperative, so this is a further example of long-term interests being sacrificed for short-term Treasury penny-pinching.
Despite these important reservations, it is unsurprising that unions and campaigners have broadly welcomed Labour’s proposals. But efforts must be redoubled across the labour movement to break the stranglehold of Treasury orthodoxy on Labour’s thinking.
Charge of the light brigade?
WHAT caused five military horses to throw their riders and bolt across central London in a blood-stained equine rampage?
That they chose the day that the government was announcing plans to increase military spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP is suggestive, particularly when allied to renewed threats over Ukraine.
The very idea of hostilities in Crimea may well have been triggering for a community still scarred by memories of the Battle of Balaclava.
Faced with the renewed prospect of Tennyson’s “valley of death” it is scarcely surprising that the noble beasts preferred Limehouse. You can lead a horse to war, but you can’t make them fight.
