Privatisation may be on its knees, but ministers can make a mess of the railways too | Simon Jenkins
Whoever owns the rail companies, they work best when they are under one management with no meddling
The collapse this week of Southeastern trains and the investigation of its accounts by the Serious Fraud Office signals the death knell of rail privatisation, after a quarter century of ideological turmoil, political interference and waste. Passengers have surged, until now. Trains have run, some of them on time. Subsidies have trebled in real terms. But the model is a shambles. Railways north, south, east and west have surrendered their franchises to the government. Only the transport minister, Grant Shapps, refuses to call it nationalisation.
Anyone who remembers British Rail in the 1980s will have an image of dirty stations, clapped-out trains, exhausted sandwiches and lateness. At the time the Tories were selling off coalmines, telecoms and public utilities, so what could be a nobler gift to private enterprise than a railway? Margaret Thatcher herself refused. She treated trains, like the Post Office, as objects of inexplicable public affection that she would not reform. John Major had no such inhibition. In the bright dawn of the 1990s, private meant freedom. The one challenge was how to privatise monopolies. Could regulators really face down private operators? Could ministers fix prices? And what of the railway?
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
