Mark Ferguson writes:
Late last week, barely noticed by the media (or party activists for that
matter), Labour took another significant public step towards a policy of
renationalising the railways.
Reacting on Thursday to Tory plans to privatise
the currently public owned East Coast service, Shadow Transport Secretary Maria
Eagle attacked the “weakness of the case for this privatisation” and attacked
privatisation as “a model that will see profits shared with shareholders, instead
of invested in services”.
Eagle’s comments were backed up by Lord Adonis and Sadiq Khan – the
transport ministers responsible for the original East Coast deal – who were
both unequivocal in their support for the publicly owned operator. Khan in particular
appeared to be sending a message when he said:
“Now that we have seen the success that can be achieved by a not for
dividend operator, it makes no sense for Ministers to proceed with this costly
privatisation.”
The obvious corollary of this is that if a nationalised/publicly owned
railway franchise can work so well, and with such benefit to the taxpayer (£800
million by the end of this year) – why isn’t Labour advocating the complete
renationalisation of the rail network?
Especially when – as our recent polling
showed – the public think that a nationalised rail network would be both
cheaper and better.
East Coast certainly seems to be performing better under
public control – journey times have been cut and the line carries a million
more passengers than it did three years ago.
For the Lanour leadership, a period of testing the water certainly seems to
be underway. Last year the
Observer reported that Labour was considering bringing the rail network
back under public control.
And when I interviewed Ed Miliband a few months ago
– on a train – he
said:
“I think this government is just ideologically committed to just
privatizing the railways and getting East Coast back into private hands. We
should be looking at mutual and public options.”
Yet at a time when there’s “no money” – as politicians are so keen to tell
us – the party can’t afford to pay huge sums of money to buy out rail
franchises.
Instead, what is being encouraged by many in the Labour movement
are plans to bring the network under public control piece by piece as the rail
franchises expire.
That’s an idea which it’s believed Maria Eagle is open to.
She certainly should be. A policy that’s popular in the country as well as
the party. A policy that would put more money in the exchequer rather than in
the hands of (over-subsidised) private sector profiteers.
At a time when Labour
lacks attention-grabbing, pledge card ready policies at a time when the
leadership are aiming to be tough on spending, surely rail nationalisation is a
no-brainer?
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