NORTHERN RAIL returns to public ownership today. It may not be for long as the government seems minded to privatise it yet again.
Unions fear that the soon to be published “Williams Review” of Britain’s railway operation will open the way to a rail reprivatisation that runs contrary to both public opinion and rational thought.
That passenger satisfaction and railway performance improves under a publicly owned system is barely contested.
This is the basis of the overwhelming consensus — shared by all except government ministers and rail industry fat cats — that Britain’s railway system should be in public ownership.
Rail privatisation is so manifestly a taxpayer subsidised scam that those who benefit from it — the train operating companies, the banks who lease the trains and rolling stock and the legions of lawyers policing the jungle of competing contractual obligations — barely dare contest this truth.
When even a majority of Tory voters desire rail to return to public ownership, we know that class power trumps even electoral logic when profits are at stake.
Now within weeks the government could pave the way for Northern Rail to be reprivatised following the recommendations in the forthcoming Williams Review.
Rail travel is a nightmare of opaque pricing, over-crowded commuter trains, huge imbalances in the level of service, with problems with reliability and timetabling, delays and disruption.
These all owe their origin to the forced separation of track and infrastructure from passenger and freight operations, from the hugely wasteful subsidy system which featherbeds private owners, from the inevitable inefficiencies that plague a system based on profit-taking rather than public service.
Today rail trade unionist, politicians and passenger groups will be at railway stations across the Northern Rail network campaigning to Keep Northern Rail Public.
They deserve the active support of us all.
Today Luxembourg is to make all public transport free. It is a small country and its free public transport policy is a sensible move to reduce car usage given the pollution, expense and infrastructure investment that heavy road usage entails.
In Britain, the environmental arguments for reducing, even eliminating private car usage, especially in urban settings, are compelling.
The practical arguments against effecting this by a policy of free public transport have some force only because in a market-driven, unplanned capitalist economy the rational design of urban space and the logical organisation of the labour market is impossible.
The corollary of the capitalist anarchy of the big city is the intense, even oppressive, regulation of daily life that goes with it.
There are few office-bound careers that would not be more enjoyable and productive if followed closer to ground level with fresh air and a green environment rather than in an air-conditioned prison in the sky.
Big city office workers, many forced into carrying out pointless and parasitic financial and administrative operations, are compelled to travel on trains and tubes that are a hellish crush or on buses or cars stuck in endless traffic jams.
This is not just a marginal argument to put a stop to the market-driven growth of what William Morris described as “the spreading sore” of the metropolis.
Sensible urban design, the rational planning of industry and education, housing and public administration; a shopping and commercial system that serves people not profit, and a public transport system that allows for the rational, purposeful and comfortable movement of people and goods is a near impossibility under capitalism and especially in an economy skewed by an unbalanced inflation of the finance industry at the expense of productive investment.
Socialism is the foundation of a humane existence.
