Monday 28 January 2013

Back To Our Routes

Our countryside was criss-crossed by the world's original and best rail network for well over a century, to the point of being largely defined by it. People who have priced everyone else out of rural areas and who now find that their houses are going to be right next to one of the busiest railways on earth deserve nothing but pointing and laughing from the rest of us.

It is motorways that are an incongruous import from the United States, from Germany, and from the simple concreting over of immemorial straight Roman roads elsewhere on the Continent. Railways are British. They are both a product and an expression both of our landscape and of our sensibility.

We led the world in everything to do with them. We could, should and must do so again. They can be run on electricity, which can be generated from our own vast reserves of coal and from nuclear power. Cars run on oil, which has to be imported from the most dangerous places on earth, in the affairs of which we are thus obliged to embroil ourselves.

But we do not need to give some private, already or soon-to-be foreign, company a license to print public money for whizzing our supposedly high fliers from one city centre to another. Still less from miles away from one city centre to miles away from another.

We need to renationalise the railways, uniquely without compensation in view of the manner of their privatisation, as the basis for a national network of public transport free at the point of use, including the reversal of bus route and rail line closures going back to the 1950s. And we need to be able to get on a train (or the tram, or the bus) in the centre of one village, town or city, in order to be able to get off it in the centre of another.

Only public ownership can deliver this. Public ownership is of course British ownership, and thus a safeguard of national sovereignty. It is also a safeguard of the Union in that it creates communities of interest across the several parts of the United Kingdom. Publicly owned concerns often even had, and should have again, the word "British" in their names.

What I pity that it was only ever "British Rail", rather than "Royal British Rail". One for the Platinum Jubilee in 2022. In Thatcher's own words about the Royal Mail, "We can't privatise that, it's Royal." Let the same apply here, linking every city and town, with the hinterland served by its central amenities, not only to each other, but also directly to the monarchy.

If there were a Tory, conservative, One Nation party, then it would be saying this. Perhaps there is?

11 comments:

  1. Correct-renationalisation is the only way forward.

    This rail link, incidentally, is the result of an EC Directive (as revealed today) which instructs countries to improve business rail travel by providing high-speed links between cities.

    The EU couldn't care less about higher rail fares and ruining the countryside.

    So long as this socialist-corporatist dictatorship can please its big business lobbyist friends.

    That's why it pours out endless socialist regulations-which kill of small businesses who can't afford to implement them-thus preserving the hegemony of the multinational Big Boys.

    Small businesses don't have the resources to lobby a remote, unaccountable supranational institution-multinational companies do.

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  2. We have been here before with claims about the EU and the railways. The alleged requirement in EU Law to split ownership of the trains from ownership of the track has somehow managed to escape the notice of every other member-state, as even the archest critics of the EU in British politics, on the Labour Left, have had no qualms about pointing out.

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  3. My only point was that renationalisation must be accompanied withdrawal from the EU-since our Government isn't sovereign over anything (including our railways) while we're in the EU.

    The Directive isn't "alleged"- you can read it for yourself on the internet.

    Once again, well done UKIP for opposing this destruction of countryside and assault on working-class fare-payers in favour of big business.

    The only party to support grammar schools and oppose mass immigration, and the only party who see that nothing good can be achieved (including railway reform) without EU departure.

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  4. Mr Lindsay.

    I just noticed you wrote that Directive 96/48 "escaped the notice of every other member state".

    Not so.

    The Paris-London link was called HS1 (not the Chunnel Tunnel) and the Dutch implemented the Directive by building a new line connecting them to the Continent (which was a disaster, requiring a £250 million taxpayer bailout).

    Directive 96/48 says any new line must connect “interoperably” with the rest of the European network.

    This is why those trains from Birmingham and the North (and, soon, Scotland) will have to connect directly with the European network.

    Delors openly said he wanted to connect the Continent to have one currency and one railway network.

    Why have you not even bothered to read this?

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  5. The railways have nothing to do with the EU. You just sound like a loony. How come no other EU member-state has noticed, if they are? There are 26. You would have thought that one of them might have done.

    There was a Labour manifesto commitment to renationalisation in 1997. The fault for not following through lies with Tony Blair. Just as the fault for privatisation lies with John Major. There is no excuse for shifting the blame from them to the EU.

    Mr Rail Privatisation, David Campbell Bannerman MEP, may now sit as a Conservative. But he was elected as UKIP, which had selected him as a candidate. UKIP's anarcho-capitalists are no friends of the railways. Any more than the Conservatives Party's anarcho-capitalists are.

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  6. I have just proved to you that they are the result of an EU Directive, and the 26 other nation states have obeyed it!

    It has nothing to do with splitting ownership of track and train-it is Directive 96/48 which requires that any new line built by a member state must connect to the Continent.

    The Dutch blew £250 million implementing this Directive-the Chunnel Tunnel was named HS1 as the first part-any new line Britain builds must now link to this European network-which is why Birmingham must link to it.

    Read the Directive if you don't believe me.

    Or read Delors calls for a Continent-wide rail network.

    Instead of calling me silly names.

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  7. Delors? He is 87. The same age as Thatcher. Whose record indicates that she took both of the same views until the early stages of dementia. If, that is, those views were not themselves the early stages of dementia.

    Yes, this thing is supposed to connect to the Continent. And yes, they like to have joined up railways across their vast land frontiers. Who knew, eh?

    You are a loon. You are a complete and utter loon. You people's monopolisation of the cause of criticising the EU in this country has done, and continues to do, immense, almost incalculable, harm to that cause.

    "There should not be rail links to the Continent, or between Continental countries"? "There never were the latter until the EU ordered them"? I ask you!

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  8. Yes, Delors. He first proposed TEN's "Trans European Networks) in 1993.

    The Birmingham link will have to connect to the Continent, via the North London line and the Chunnel Tunnel.

    Directive 96/48 has NOT been ignored by other member states-the Paris-London and the Dutch link were part of it.

    And Labour did not promise renationalisation in 1997-get your facts right!

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  9. We (as it then was) most certainly did! I doubt that you can remember.

    Of course this connects to the Continent, and of course there are rail links between Continental countries.

    Would you rather not have these things? They are nothing to do with the EU. In this case, frankly, even if they were. But they are not.

    Get out of the way. You can only do damage.

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  10. It's charming to see you taking Cameron's side (and that of the EU and big business) against his rebels and UKIP, over a destructive EU project that will devastate poor commuters, rural communities and our best countryside-for absolutely no good reason.

    As one of your contributors has already pointed out, re-nationalisation wasn't promised in 97, so Tony Blair was within his rights not to do it.

    And I didn't notice Labour rebelling against his glorious long leadership over the issue. Did you?

    "they are nothing to do with the EU"

    Repeating bald assertions like a baby won't make them true-it just shows your incapable of argument.

    I've proved beyond doubt it is linked to the EU-the Dutch had no non-EU motive for building that disastrous link, it runs 85% empty and had to be bailed out to the tune of quarter of a billion, by the taxpayer!

    And, yes, the rail link is a terrible thing-he fact that there absolutely no benefits, time or cost savings to this, has been demonstrated endlessly over the past few months.

    Environmental and countryside groups are joining with local communities and hard-hit commuters to campaign against this colossal waste of money-which benefits nobody but big business

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  11. Stop pretending to be more than one person. And look up the 1997 Labour Manifesto it is certainly there.

    Good, if totally unsurprising, to see the side being taken by UKIP: people who paid three million pounds for converted village halls in the Chilterns and are left wondering why there are no jumble sales or coffee mornings.

    Replacing the Tories as the second party of the North? Pull the other one!

    Meanwhile, UKIP is apparently also opposed to rail links with the Continent, which were supported by Enoch Powell, and even to rail links between Continental countries, as if that were somehow any of Britain's business.

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