POLITICS
A rail fiasco impends, and the Government will naturally try to blame it on Jimmy Knapp
BORIS JOHNSON
Ifind it hard to believe that the Govern- ment can take much real joy in the settle- ment of the signalmen's dispute, whatever the terms. This politically helpful distrac- tion at an end, there is nothing for it but to press on with what many would say is an embarrassingly flawed privatisation. Dr Brian Mawhinney, the new Transport Sec- retary, has set his granite face against the mutterings of the experts. Tory virility is at stake. The show must go on. In theory, the first six passenger franchises must be auc- tioned off by Christmas. It might, though, be more sensible to beat a dignified retreat now.
As one City transport analyst said of the privatisation: 'It's b*****ed.' It seems only a short while ago that the public had a fair- ly clear idea of what the great wheeze was all about. Companies were to be invited to bid for the exciting privilege of running trains. Entrepreneurs like Mr Richard Branson would launch wonderful new liver- ied services with back-of-the-seat MTV, earphones, Branson's Breakfast Sizzlers and those useful red socks. It was going to be topless waitresses and Harry Ramsden's Fish and Chip and Rail company.
Even in those days, people admitted that the actual word privatisation was a slight misnomer. These train operating compa- nies were always intended to be kept alive by enormous transfusions of public cash. As for any bright-eyed souls on the right of the Tory party who might have had Ayn Rand-style fantasies of shining, straining locomotives racing each other in parallel down the ringing grooves of change: well, they were soon disabused. Real competi- tion, in railways, was always absurd, unless one was prepared to imagine colossal investment in duplicate track and rolling stock.
And the plan was never likely to alter the basic incoherence of the Government's transport 'policy'. This involves spending £2 billion per year to build an ever denser spi- der's web of roads over the British land- scape, while simultaneously spending £2.1 billion on keeping up the 11,000 miles of railway, including routes such as the Settle to Carlisle and Inverness to Thurso, used, one imagines, only by the odd crofter and writers such as Mr Paul Theroux in search of atmosphere.
In any event, under the terms of the Rail- ways Act of 1993, it became virtually impossible to prune the uneconomic branches. The Government funked it in the face of revolt in the shires, from those in marginal seats, and influential voices out on small, puttering lines: John Gummer in East Anglia and John Biffen in Oswestry. So relax, all you astonishingly many whose hearts quicken at the anapaestic noise of train wheels. The rail strike may have shown convincingly that it is possible to run an adequate core service on the main com- muter routes, with a mere 1,500 signalmen, without seriously inconveniencing the nation. But there neither is nor was a hid- den Government agenda to follow Sir Alfred Sherman and tarmac over the less- beaten tracks.
As a privatisation in the strict sense, then, the scheme does not go as far as it might. Failure, therefore, would be all the more humiliating; and it would be a traves- ty to blame the problem on the dispute with the Rail, Maritime and Transport Union.
Under the first and most difficult stage of the plan outlined by Mr Roger Freeman, Transport Minister, 51 per cent of all cur- rent passenger services must be franchised to the 'train operating companies' by April 1996. That means dividing up BR into 25 separate railway companies. The depart- ment of Transport claims there have been 50 'expressions of interest'. Oh. Ah. Really. Talk to the big bus companies such as Stagecoach or Badger Lines, who were originally thought to be attracted, or Bran- son, or Mr Peter Waterman, he who discov- ered Kylie Minogue's musical talents and is also chairman of the specialist Waterman Railways, which runs non-timetabled ser- vices; and with varying inflections, the answer is the same: no way.
The view in the industry is that there may very well be as many as five management buy-outs of the railway parcels that could make economic sense: the East and West Coast mainlines to Glasgow and Edinburgh, the Great Western railway, Scotrail and the Midlands routes. But as for the rest, £340 million-losing Network South East, with its shades of the Sverdlovsk district lines: `They're not even going to be able to give those away,' says Mr Waterman.
A fiasco impends, and the Government will naturally try to blame it on Jimmy Knapp and the Stalinists of the General Grades Committee of the RMT. In reality, the origins of the Government's difficulty uncomfortably predate the strike. They lie in the essence of the 'privatised' structure — the split between trains and track, the 25 so-far notional companies and Railtrack. This is not merely a question of the immense bureaucracy, the fantastic legal costs, to be generated by the spaghetti-like relationships between the 80 companies which will in theory supersede what we once called British Rail. One of the turn- offs for potential franchise-holders, for instance, is that every putative train operat- ing company would be required to strike separate legal agreements with each station it proposes to use.
The central flaw is that the Government would also eventually like to privatise Rail- track, which it sees as a vast money-spinner, worth upwards of £6 billion. The Treasury thinks of all those railway arches that could be turned into wine bars, and it rubs its hands. But in order to make Railtrack attractive for sale, the Government has stipulated that it shall charge train compa- nies for access. The trouble is that it is this prospect, of being charged unknown sums for access to track, as well as the knowledge that Government subsidy is intended grad- ually to shrink, that is making potential train operators so leery; and not just the prospect of the RMT still having its hands on the signal levers.
In short, railway privatisation has all the symptoms of a fizzle, and a moderately serious embarrassment for the Tories in the run-up to the next election. Unless, that is, the Government is prepared to deluge the potential train operators with so much sub- sidy that it becomes worth their while. In which case Mr Jonathan Aitken, at the Trea- sury, will have to decide which cause he loves more: privatisation, or saving money.
Boris Johnson writes for the Daily Tele- graph.
Previous page
