Tuesday 16 August 2011

Paying The Price

Say what you like about monetarism, but at least it keeps down inflation, eh? And who needs a domestic food supply, or domestic sources of energy? After all, who or what is supposed to guarantee such things? The State?

Why, in that case, we might as well have the renationalisation of 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. The very idea!

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, the East Coast Main Line being a case in point. Publicly owned concerns often even had the word "British" in their names. They could have, and should have, again.

With all the stock built in Britain, of course.

2 comments:

  1. I won't parse all of this, though you can take it as read that I disagree with most of it.

    An interesting aside, though, from DL about the closure of rail services "going back to the 1950s". Obviously by the 1950s the viability of local railways (for freight, from which the majority of revenue always came) was under pressure from increasingly effective road haulage. The strategic decisions that were made to give up local railways as a bad job and rely on road haulage of freight were made by the nationalised authority that controlled both industries. Naturally a profit-making freight line could subsidise the continuance of a passenger service, but the same was not true on the roads. Hence the decision to move from rail-hauled to road-hauled freight led to the withdrawal both first of rail passenger traffic and then of road passenger traffic as hopelessly uneconomic on their own. This was true even of heavily-used lines like the commuter lines of South London.

    The outwardly curious fact that commuter trains cannot make a profit even when run at and beyond capacity is explained when it is considered that in the days of the Southern Railway (in this case) the costs of running the railway were shared between passenger operations (very profitable for a few hours a day, loss-making at other times) and goods operations (marginally profitable at most times). Ordinary assengerservices have always made a loss. But the Southern Railway (in this case) had the incentive to run both services, firstly because each effectively cross-subsidised the other, and secondly because their corporate image of reliability and responsibility, maintained by providing good and regular passenger services, was the best advertisement to sell to businessmen their freight-carrying services. (The businessmen, of course, would not have been impressed if there had been no trains to take them to the office and back, or to the seaside.)

    The rational (within its narrow limits) planning of the state in the newly-nationalised 1950s began the process of sweeping all this away. Nor is privatisation to blame for accelerating this process: there hasn't been any rail privatisation! What there has been is an arrangement for public money to be paid over to private companies for running parts of the railway. That arrangement was almost corrupt, but its very corruption is evidence that it was not a real privatisation. The rational (within its narrow limits) planning of the state still determines the outcome, albeit at increased cost to the taxpayer.

    My solution: the reprivatisation of the railways, uniquely without compensation in view of the manner of their nationalisation. Let the railway company, answerable to its users and shareholders, be responsible for the running of the whole railway, and let them bear the risk of their responsibility. Even more than in the last period of responsible ownership, the public would not be beholden to them. We have other options for transport, but if the railway really is a better option...

    They would all build their stock in Britain, of course, as they always did. Not because the market was fixed to ensure it, but because by using their own resources to source, design and transport their own needs (and largely to build them, too) friction costs were kept low, and building British really was the best deal. It is not from the benevolence of the railway director...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Sorry for going off-topic but did you say you had a couple of books coming out soon?

    ReplyDelete