Why Nationalised Railways Would be Better

Ben Holmes writes : ’I really do not see the benefits of nationalisation for the rail industry. What makes this particular industry so special that Mr Hitchens would rather have this nationalised, yet would not accept the nationalisation of major energy industries such as coal? What makes him so confident that the poor service, lame apologies, closures at every possible turn, would cease under a government that manages public services incompetently and at enormous expense? Not to mention that due to the restricted nature of train travel, it is a far less convenient mode of transport than cars or even buses, as they only come along at certain times and you must plan your journey around them. With cars you can come and go as you please. You are given a greater degree of freedom. I do not believe that the railways can meet the needs of modern Britain, which requires a greater degree of precision and speed than trains will allow.’

I don’t know why Mr Holmes thinks I am against the nationalisation of major energy industries. I think there was a case for nationalising coal, made in the 1920s and accepted by many people for non-dogmatic reasons. There are many questions about what form of state ownership is best (these days most governments have abandoned the responsibility of ownership, and opted for the power-without-responsibility system of tight regulation, which has virtually abolished accountability. Is this better?

I have always believed that the electric power grid should be nationalised. I think it should be renationalised  as a prelude to an enormous programme of nuclear power station building, without which we face an appalling energy crisis within 20 years.    I also recall that when British Gas was privatised its national monopoly structure was maintained ( and a good thing too).  The Post office’s problems are largely caused by the EU ‘s postal directive, which have robbed Royal Mail (or whatever it is now called) of the premium services which enabled it to cross-subsidise a cheap, efficient and accessible network of letter deliveries and sub post offices. The old pre-EU GPO worked very well. It was nationalised, I think, by that dogmatic Trot, King Charles II.
 
He asks  ‘What makes him (me) so confident that the poor service, lame apologies, closures at every possible turn, would cease under a government that manages public services incompetently and at enormous expense?’

I answer, in itself, nothing. I don’t imagine a nationalised railways system would be perfect, just significantly better.  But privatisation has shown that private ownership does not in any way get rid of these things, which have increased since the sell-off. Thus they are not diseases of nationalisation. In general, the problems of the railways are caused by 80 or so years during which they have been starved of investment, which has been diverted to gigantically subsidised nationalised roads and to air transport, provided with airports and air traffic control by initial state spending,  and vastly subsidised by being exempted from fuel tax . The government subsidy which is given to the railways  (much of it now diverted into the trousers of the train operating companies) allows them to continue to operate, but not to expand in response to demand (in fact they were forced to contract on the eve of a great expansion of population and transport need, by Richard Beeching’s ill-thought-out cuts) , not to electrify the network properly (a task which should have been completed decades ago, and was so completed in comparable European economies).

 

The railways are always apologising because they have been starved in this way. Their ancient diesel engines break down. Their signalling systems are antiquated and unreliable. Their financial structure, and decades of route contraction, compel them to cram as many passengers as possible in smasller and smaller trains. Meanwhile nationalised roads are constantly lavished with funds for expansion, widening and so-called improvement - despite the known fact that their capacity is severely limited, and even with all this spending cannot keep pace with the demand it creates, which tends to do no more than shift bottlenecks about). Railways, being a far more efficient means of transporting people and especially goods, would if expanded give far better returns on investment than roads, and be much better able to keep pace with demand.  

 

The nationalised railways managed to preserve a level of competence in maintenance and management which seems to have eluded the new privatised or semi-privatised companies. I suspect ( see Ian Jack's work on this in that fine book 'The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain') that the two things may be connected. 

 

They also sustained a native industry of locomotive carriage and wagon building which is now almost entirely extinct. They also managed to maintain the track at night and on Sundays, without the levels of disruption now common. 

Mr Holmes adds : ’ Not to mention that due to the restricted nature of train travel, it is a far less convenient mode of transport than cars or even buses, as they only come along at certain times and you must plan your journey around them.’

Well, this isn’t a problem for the Burkeian conservative, who can see nothing wrong in a transport system in which people must apply a small amount of self-discipline in return for more orderly and peaceful society ( which a car-free society certainly would be) . Most car journeys are irrational and unhealthy short-hops which could just as easily be done on foot or by bicycle. But car-owners, who have been compelled or cajoled by the Great Car Economy into buying or leasing these expensive monsters, quickly realise that they spend most of their time depreciating at the roadside, and feel the need to use them a lot to justify their enormous cost.

Cars in modern Britain are also fantasy objects (there’s a book to be written on TV and cinema commercials for cars, which contrive to suggest that the buyer will transform his life in some way if he owns the machine, or simply portray the car as an object of worship, or idol, self-evidently desirable. People who like cars, or think they’re normal  artefacts  live in a sort of Clarkson reverie).

Have car enthusiasts any idea how odd they seem to those who are unconvinced by the merits of the motor car?  They do seem to have an unreasoning attachment to these things which even Freud might have some difficulty explaining.  I’ve yet to see a car advertisement that portrays the car’s use in this country use honestly,  ie, parked in the rain for most of its life, losing value while being of no use, and cluttering up a large area of urban space, , then  stuck in a traffic jam, or series of traffic jams,  and then searching for ages for a parking space close to one’s destination rather than parking where a space actually is, and walking , say, half a mile to the destination. During all this time, the owner and his family are suffering chronic declining health owing to their being spared the need to take basic exercise,  an apparent convenience which will end in avoidable heart disease, the driver is developing lower back problems, and the car must be fuelled by oil imported from the most appalling despotisms on earth. Not to mention what happens if there’s a crash. Which is much, much more common in cars than in trains.

Mr Holmes says : ‘With cars you can come and go as you please. You are given a greater degree of freedom. I do not believe that the railways can meet the needs of modern Britain, which requires a greater degree of precision and speed than trains will allow.’

Well, the car owner can, up to a point, come and go as he or she pleases (traffic jams, roadworks and jammed-up car parks permitting) . Though if you design and subsidise a transport system around his or her needs, you leave out what I believe is the majority of the population which either does not own a car or cannot drive.  This freedom’ is restricted to the car owner, and deprives the non-owner of the freedom to live without constant engine and tyre noise, or without constant dirtying of the air with petrol and diesel fumes,  or without constant danger on the roads from large erratically-driven hunks of steel , glass and rubber which are as safe or unsafe (for the passenger, the pedestrian or  cyclist) as the driver who happens to be at the wheel at the time, and variable according to the driver’s temper, mental state, drink and drug tastes, and sleep patterns. To be modern  isn't necessarily to be more civilised than old-fashioned Britain was. Modern often means noisy, cheap, bland, throwaway.

Then there’s the problem of goods , which are pushed on to road by the heavy subsidies paid into maintaining and constantly extending  the nationalised road system by the taxpayer, compared with the pitifully inadequate subsidies provided for  maintaining rail freight transport (and hardly ever for extending it) .

As for ‘precision’, the reopening of many closed railway lines (and German-style rules compelling factories and warehouses which are close to railway lines to maintain sidings permitting rail freight access) would make the railways a good deal more precise (just as sensible restrictions on the use of  heavy lorries in populated areas would make the roads less so). I cannot for the life of me work out what he means by suggesting that roads allow greater speeds than railways. I should have thought this was simply untrue.