Morning:
8°c
Even for an industry which never stops inventing new ways to make its service third-rate and its customers' lives a misery, yesterday on the railways was pretty special.
We are, of course, all too used to one element of the torture - the ritual annual fare rises of three, four or five times inflation, which came into effect yesterday. It's the railways' unique version of the January sales: they should put up placards in the stations boasting " Highest Ever Prices!" and "Up To £250 On!"
But the inspired new twist of the knife was this: yesterday, as well as hiking fares by up to 14.5 per cent, they cut the service by up to 100 per cent. Liverpool Street, Britain's third busiest station, was shut. So was much of the country's busiest main line, the West Coast.
Liverpool Street and the West Coast had already been subjected to some of the longest planned closures seen over the holiday period: 10 days for the former, six for the latter. Yet even this was not enough for the Network Rail amateurs.
Yesterday's Evening Standard had a remarkable front-page picture of Liverpool Street in the morning rushhour, with the ticket barriers that should have been admitting thousands of people to fuel the London economy instead deserted and taped off like a crime scene.
In one way, perhaps it was: this week's fiasco showed that railway privatisation is a continuing crime against the public interest. Because this week's chaos is merely an extreme version of what the privatised railways do to us all the time.
The true mark of privatisation's failure is the stagnation it has visited on the infrastructure of the railways, even in the face of fast-rising traffic. In its last decade of life, despite a much tougher economic climate, British Rail electrified around 700 route miles and opened dozens of new stations in England. In its first decade, the privatised railway opened virtually no new stations in England - and electrified six route miles.
It's impossible to imagine that this is the country that gave the world the railways, such has been their decline. Forgotten and unloved as the country pushed for more motorways and better roads, they have eroded to the extent that they're a laughing stock. Instead of continuing to invest heavily in them, the Thatcher government chose to divest - putting in place a privatisation which, even by the standards of some of the state sell-offs, was convoluted.
To be fair to ministers, the rail bosses at the time were not deserving of public largesses. Blessed with a bureaucratic, over-weaning management, the best solution was to sell the railways off, in the hope that the private sector could do better.
It is worth looking back, to remind ourselves just how bad the railways were back then. Privatisation has had some positive impact - hard to believe, but services overall really are more efficient than they were back then.
But that improvement has come at a price - fares have spiralled at a rate that bears no comparison to the market. The sale itself was a cop-out - rather than flog the lot to one company, one management, the Government broke it up. In a decision that now appears misguided, they separated engineering and maintenance from operating and ticketing.
The first rule of business is that the customer is always right. The frontline of any firm is the interface with the consumer, the closing of the sale. It puts pressure on the company to perform, to be on their mettle. But with trains, that exposure is lacking. The people who screwed up the Rugby engineering works - thus causing havoc at Euston and on the West Coast line - and also caused the over-running which necessitated the closure of Liverpool Street are not those who have to confront angry commuters and frustrated long-distance travellers.
If they were, they might realise the misery they provoke, and they may even begin to understand what it feels like to be charged what seems like a king's ransom, only to be forced on to a bus. Their disputes will be settled behind closed doors at a later date, over copious cups of tea in meeting rooms. The heat will have gone, the passion diminished.
The bosses of Network Rail, those responsible, will wriggle their way out of yet another fiasco. The Government, still the controller of the system, will then hear their excuses and move on. Heavens, they may even get the bonuses that their contracts say they are entitled to - £30 million for Network Rail managers and staff last year after the statefunded company made a £1 billion profit.
While it may claim to produce a surplus, Network Rail is a money-draining machine. Public subsidy on the trains is higher than what it was in the old BR days - £5.4 billion a year to move 1.1 million customers, compared with BR's £3.5 billion to shift 750 million passengers.
This isn't good enough. Far from paying bonuses and pumping in more cash, heads must roll. But the Government needs to go further - it must change its own mindset. For the 10 years of Labour rule there's always been the impression that transport is not at the top of the party's agenda - hospitals and schools are more coveted posts in the hierarchy. That must change. Gordon Brown should ask himself whether Transport Secretary Ruth Kelly is the right person to sort out the mess.
Brown should take a step back and contemplate even more radical measures. Hitherto, at government level, the real root of the trouble, there has been a consistent process of trying to pretend that the latest lash-up to fix privatisation works. Well, it doesn't. It cannot be fixed. It is fundamentally broken.
What is needed is new ownership. The Mayor taking over London commuter services may go some way. But the trains are not local to London - we're a small country, people travel to work from everywhere, merely defining what constitutes a "commuter service" is not clear-cut.
No, it may time to consider the "r" word - renationalisation. Perish the thought but perhaps it must happen - there are too many vested interests, too many operators, and a hopeless engineer for it to work in its current form.
The case is one of necessity: Britain's transport crisis is now as serious a threat to our productivity and competitiveness as was trade union power in the Seventies. Yesterday, the railways' own Black Wednesday, shows that the network is simply too important to be left to the incompetents now in charge of it. Gordon Brown should think on that today.
