ANDREW McKie’s column on rail nationalisation (“There is no evidence that rail nationalisation would work”, The Herald, January 4) deserves a response. One of the statements he makes is that a five-year-old comparison of customer satisfaction found that the UK had improved in customer satisfaction more than the other 24 countries polled. All this shows is a greater degree of improvement than the others; it doesn’t imply in any way that the UK’s privatised railways have caught up with those of the rest of western Europe – far from it.
He is right to imply that satisfaction would have been substantially even less when the railways were nationalised but one wonders in what condition the railways would have been in today had the governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major, against all advice, not decided to fragment the railway into the 23 passenger train operating franchises that we have at present, plus a further seven for freight. On top of that, we have nine leasing companies that lease the rolling stock to the operators.
The hundreds of millions of pounds from the taxpayer to pay for the myriad legal fees, obscene salaries and bonuses to each of the board members of these companies could have gone a long way towards providing Britain with a structured, interlinked rail system run by a nationalised or a public/private partnership as a single entity.
Yes, the post-war period was marked by decline in the railways but let’s not be too hasty to blame Richard Beeching. It should be noted that Dr Beeching did not axe one single mile of railway or close a single station; he merely prepared the report. It was a Conservative government with Ernest Marples, of road building firm Marples Ridgeway fame, as transport minister who did that, enthusiastically continued by Harold Wilson’s Labour government.
To be fair, much of the system did need to be trimmed but, instead of following the French practice of leaving the track bed in place for 10 years so that services and routes could be reinstated as demand required, we rushed to sell off the land to housing developers.
I would also like to see Andrew McKie’s evidence for the statement that most British Rail users are richer than the average member of the public, an assertion that is difficult to believe. Yes, railways will always need to be subsidised by the taxpayer but, without them, the subsidies would simply be thrown on to greater road building projects with all the attendant disruption and pollution that they cause.
Furthermore, in recognising that a subsidy will always be needed, as in all other countries, it is not unreasonable to believe that a nationalised or semi- nationalised railway running as a single entity would require much less of a subsidy instead of lining the pockets of those who have put the railways into the chaos that they are in today.
Bob Buntin,
GF1 Morland House,
Longhill, Skelmorlie.
ANDREW McKie is opposed to rail nationalisation because there’s no evidence it would improve matters.I would point out the East Coast Main Line, which was re-nationalised after failure in the private sector and subsequently run at a profit. This example of a successful state enterprise was re-privatised by the Conservatives, purely because of their ideological opposition to state ownership, and it failed again.
The hypocrisy of the Right on this issue can be further illustrated by the fact that, while being opposed to state ownership by our own Government, no contradiction is seen if it is a foreign one.
ScotRail, an apparently private company, is owned by a subsidiary of NS,the Dutch state railway.This is not the only example. Until recently, trains in Wales were run by Arriva, which is a subsidiary of Deutsche Bahn, the German state railway.
I do not know if re-nationalisation of the railways would work or not. The biggest problem they have long had is lack of investment, by governments of either stripe.
Electrification, for example, means faster, greener, more efficient trains.Yet Britain has a relatively small proportion of its network electrified.
The problems of the railways are complex so there probably isn’t a simple solution. What is clear is that the Conservatives’ chosen method of privatisation – followed nowhere else in the world – is not it.
Alan Jenkins,
111 Helensburgh Drive,
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