ALMOST a quarter of a century ago, John Major’s government passed the Railways Act. Public ownership and polystyrene sandwiches were out, to be replaced by a zesty new generation of rail providers from the world of private enterprise. Glum socialised uniformity would be displaced by a giddy world of affordability and efficiency.
The invisible hand of the market would gently refashion British Rail’s lumbering carriages into silver bullets, scything through pleasant pastures green and past dark satanic mills. That was the theory anyway. In Scotland, National Express took up the reins, lost them to First Group in 2004, who lost them in turn to Abellio on April’s Fools Day 2015.
Twenty-four years into this experiment, I can exclusively confirm that polystyrene sandwiches remain available on all major rail routes near you. But there are more substantive concerns about Britain’s privatised railways.
Earlier this month, it was announced that peak fares will climb by 3.6 per cent next year, gobbling up yet more of commuters’ pay-packets. The Scottish Government took care to incorporate separate rules for off-peak travellers, whose tariffs can only rise by the retail price index, with 1 per cent knocked off. This should, as transport minister Humza Yousaf says, “ensure Scotland has the lowest price increases in the UK”.
But across the country, you can understand the anxiety that Britons are likely to end up paying “more for less” under the current settlement, while private contractors continue to turn a profitable coin. A mighty travel bill, but only sporadic provision on elderly rolling stock, more voyages of the damned on delayed, overcrowded trains, more grimy journeys of oxters and elbows.
Inflationary pressures will apply whoever is directing Britain’s railway networks – but surely we should be able to choose who is best-placed to answer the public need for a decent network, which is punctual, affordable and clean. You don’t have to be a radical socialist to wonder why a professional, public-minded state provider couldn’t make a decent fist of it, undistracted by the profit motive the Tories put at the centre of Britain’s privatised rail provision.
But for most of its history, Holyrood hasn’t had this option. When Tony Blair established the Scottish Parliament in 1998, he took special care to put the regulation of Scotland’s railways beyond the powers of Scotland’s government. Successive Edinburgh administrations were handed responsibility for deciding who won the competitive tender to run Scotland’s tracks, but they were all forced to live within John Major’s private franchising rules. And these rules were unambivalent: “public sector operators” can’t be bidders. That means any company or subsidiary which is majority owned by ministers or local government could forget it.
None of these inconvenient facts has stopped a succession of Scottish Labour figures – from Jeremy Corbyn downwards – from suggesting that the tartan Tories of the SNP are somehow responsible for “privatising” Scotland’s railways. They return to the theme compulsively, again and again. Back in 2015, Corbyn claimed Scottish ministers “could have taken a different option and could have pushed for public ownership rather than handing it over to the Dutch public”. Even a cursory examination of the facts shows this is a whopper.
I do understand: facts are boring. If your whole political identity is built around the idea you are white knight of the left, I’m sure it is much more fun to shake your fist at the heavens than deal with the logical fallout of the regulations the last Labour government assiduously maintained.
It is a statutory requirement to refer to politicians like Neil Findlay and his fellow travellers as “left-wing firebrands”, but this description makes politicians of Mr Findlay’s ilk seem all too interesting. The kind of fellow who sings Bandiera Rossa when he is half-cut, and whose conception of nuanced analysis is to preface any and every declaration of this political position with “as a socialist”.
Scotland is thick-planted with bores of this kind, whose mouths race ahead of their brains, and who are content to be righteously indifferent to any inconvenient facts of political life, just so long as these ageing urban guerrillas are given the opportunity to share anecdotes about their holiday in Havana.
Corbyn may be a slow study – a few facts are plain. When the Abellio Scotrail franchise was awarded almost three years ago, considering a public-sector bid was illegal. Faced with this challenge, Scottish Labour has only this comic argument to offer. The Scottish Government should simply – wait. This had, and has, an air of complete unreality.
Consider the timeline. In November 2013, the tendering shortlist was published, leaving five companies in contention to take on Scotrail. On the 8th of October 2014, Abellio was announced as the victor, contracted to deliver rail services for a seven-year spell. According to the luminaries of the Scottish Labour Party, at this stage, the Scottish Government ought not to have sped forward with a new franchisee, but to have left the nation’s railways in suspended animation under a dying contract with an unpreferred provider.
During this period, says Labour, Nicola Sturgeon should have crossed her fingers and waited for the law to be changed to allow a hypothetical public sector provider to exercise a hypothetical legal power to make a hypothetical bid to undertake the modest task of providing travel for hundreds of thousands of souls from Mallaig to Scrabster, and everywhere in between.
Let me remind you: in October 2014, the Smith Commission had not met. Scottish Labour was still furiously hedging its devolution bets. Nobody knew what the process would yield. No draft Bill had been published, and no concrete list of new powers had been agreed or past. David Mundell finally unveiled the UK Government’s devolution proposals in May 2015 – losing several sections of the Smith consensus as he went. But the railway provision was there. In future, public-sector operators would be able throw their hats in the ring for Scottish contracts. But even that didn’t kick in immediately. So when precisely did the Scottish Government win the power even to consider public-sector rail bids?
The answer, ladies and gentlemen, is the rump end of March 2016, when Her Majesty finally gave the royal nod to the Scotland Act. For the starry-eyed Corbynist, determined to paint the SNP as Tartan Tories, none of these inconvenient details matters: the SNP privatised Scotland’s railways. But back in the reality-based community, where you don’t have to believe six impossible things before breakfast, the good news is: an orderly, thoughtful public-sector bid to run Scotland’s railways is finally possible. I’ll take that bland fact over Corbyn’s through the looking glass rhetoric any day.
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