On romanticising nationalised railways...

I am currently reading Ghost stations: essays and branchlines by Patrick McGuinness. I am enjoying the book and why would I not? I am most interested in ghosts, stations, ghost stations, essays and branchlines. The author has an engaging tone and interesting back story with the author being an Oxford academic but having his roots in post-industrial Belgium. Even though not yet halfway through, I would not hesitate to recommend it.

Yet early on I started bristling at a point that I find typical of this genre of book, literary non-fiction about place and landscape. That is a tendency to venerate the public sector and damn the private sector, romanticise the days before ‘neo-liberalism’, while at the same time preaching against nostalgia.

So McGuinness has a sideswipe at Michael Portillo for presenting a programme about railways when he is a ‘former privatisation-randy Tory ideologue’. He goes on to make a comment that it would be more appropriate if Portillo used Beeching not Bradshaw as a guide and travelled by car.

Now here goes. I am hardly a privatising Tory though I am admittedly on the economic liberal wing of the Liberal Democrats. I have a soft spot for Portillo in his post-political incarnation and enjoy his railway programmes. I think he genuinely reevaluated his worldview after the Tory defeat of 1997 and more so after he left politics, becoming less of a doctrinaire Thatcherite. It seems unfair to damn someone for views they once held and not acknowledge that they may have changed their mind. Also Portillo was once complimentary about my wife Dorothy when she was Mayor of Watford so to my mind that shows he can be capable of good judgement.

Whether or not influenced by my  positive perception of latter-day Portillo, I detect in McGuinness’s comments a rhetorical sleight of hand that turns an aesthetic or cultural enthusiasm into an ideological test. I don’t know whether Portillo has repented for introducing rail privatisation nor how he would respond to McGuinness. But I could hypothesise a reply that runs something like this.

“Why should it be seen as hostile to railways for someone who supports private enterprise to think they should be privately run? It means giving them the chance of more effective management. This is illustrated by rail journeys more than doubling during the era of privatisation, at least until the pandemic, whereas they declined under the nationalised British Rail. By definition I am travelling routes that have survived and even thrived under private management and of course they were originally built by private enterprise.

“More than that the Beeching cuts happened while the railways were nationalised, as did real and proposed acts of vandalism such as the destruction of the Euston Arch and the plan to demolish the magnificent Midland Hotel at St Pancras. Pre-privatisation British Rail was seen as a national joke – for example being damned as the biggest failure of all privatised industries in opinion polling conducted for Abrams and Rose’s famous 1960 publication Must Labour lose? – aresponse to that party’s third successive electoral defeat. So let’s not be nostalgic for it.”

I am playing devil’s advocate there to a degree. I know that rail use was increasing even before privatisation. The private sector is more than capable of poor service delivery, inefficiency and architectural vandalism. Other countries have successful state-run rail services so nationalisation can work and privatisation is no panacea – not least with the sense of fragmentation rather than one coherent service that has been such an annoying feature of rail travel in the last 30 or so years. Maybe the problem in the 1970s and before was how the railways were run not that they were state-run per se. There has even been a revisionist literature from the likes of Christian Wolmar arguing that the nationalised British railways were a success. I have no objection to the current government bringing railways back into public ownership and on some days might say I support it.

Yet there is something that annoys me at the cosy certainties of left-of-centre intellectuals, of which I am using McGuinness as an exemplar, who seem to go weak at the knees at something being publicly owned while regarding private sector management as intrinsically perfidious. In reality one doesn’t need to listen to people’s experience of state-owned and run services for long to know it isn’t one long tale of kindness, public spiritedness and efficiency. I am reminded of Dennis Healey’s question, aimed at Tony Benn, of whether Labour really wanted to nationalise Marks and Spencer to make it as efficient as the Co-op. (To be fair that joke will have worked better in 1978 than it does today.)

Does this matter? Am I crossing the street to find fault with an author whose work I am actually enjoying? While I may be using him as an example, he does not represent the liberal left as a whole and should not stand proxy for it. Yet I bristle and baulk because I feel such attitudes are common on the left and not helpful when most people have a mixture of experiences of working for and receiving services from both public and private sector bodies and will have a more complex experience than public = good, private = bad. The fact that lefties do see it in such manichean terms may just be something that voters will find off-putting.

POSTSCRIPT: Troubled by insomnia, in the middle of the night I switched the light on and started reading. Looking at the cover of the book I suddenly realised that when writing this I had got my Patrick Mc's wired up wrong in my head - so had used the name of Patrick McLoughlin, the Conservative politician, when I meant to write Patrick McGuinness, the author whose book I am reading. Given the latter's evident fierce anti-Tory proclivities this was quite the faux pas. Scarlet faced I rushed to the computer to make the corrections and bury the evidence of error.

George Eliot as Coventry City supporter

One of my occasional flights of fantasy is thinking anachronistically about what football teams historic political or cultural figures might have supported.

In that regard, I sometimes refer to George Eliot as a Coventry City supporter even though she died three years before the club was founded.

Prompted by Coventry City’s return to top-flight football after a 25-year absence and seeing the great author’s grave at Highgate Cemetery earlier in the summer, I have been pondering that a little more in the last few weeks. I think there are good reasons to see affinity between the two.

They are certainly her local team. As Mary Ann Evans, Eliot spent her childhood near Nuneaton, went to school in Coventry and lived there for many years. These days the whole area of Coventry and North Warwickshire is marketed as ‘George Eliot country’.

Not all authors, though, offer a favourable view of their home city. James Joyce and Dublin come most obviously to mind. The other author who one thinks of when Coventry is mentioned, Philip Larkin, was at best ambivalent about the city. Yet there is every reason to suppose that Mary Ann Evans had some affection for Coventry. While the events of Middlemarch – the eponymous town clearly based on Coventry –are hardly a long tale of happy harmony, no great novel is, the town itself is not portrayed unsympathetically.

There are other reasons though, grounded in her work, to see a connection between Eliot and the Sky Blues. She chose to set most of her novels in unglamorous, provincial settings, not always directly within the Coventry area but clearly drawing on that landscape. And Coventry City have never been a glamorous or fashionable club. While teams based in all other large Midland cities – Birmingham, Nottingham, Leicester and Derby – have had their moment of glory as English league champions, Coventry City’s only major national trophy was a single FA Cup win in 1987.

So the characteristics of a Coventry City supporter involve a degree of stoicism, persistence and determination to overcome adversity. They have had a lot of the latter to deal with in the last 25 years, as the club went down to the fourth tier and lost access to their home stadium, having to play games at different times in Northampton and Birmingham.

Eliot’s heroes and heroines demonstrate similar qualities: Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch, Adam Bede and maybe most of all Tom Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss, stubborn but determined to recover from disaster. By contrast, those seeking glamour or having delusions of grandeur, Rosamund Vincy, Arthur Donnithorne or Edward Casaubon, are seen as ultimately destructive. Note: Anyone thinking from the above that ‘He’s only read three George Eliot novels and can’t remember them that well’ would be spot on.

So based on her place of birth and upbringing, I believe George Eliot would make a pretty good Sky Blues supporter. There is no great evidence of her being interested in team sport, although I suspect she might have found football crowds an interesting phenomenon. I don’t see her as a potential season ticket holder at the CBS Arena. But perhaps she would have raised her eyes from more cerebral matters, checked the results and smiled at a Coventry City win.

As the city is my birthplace, I am a lifelong supporter of Coventry City, if mostly a passive one. And after living here for 50 years, I have really transferred my loyalty to Watford FC, whose fortunes I follow far more closely. With the clubs being in different leagues this year I can cheer wholeheartedly for both without any sense of divided loyalties. I like to think that Mary Ann Evans, Coventrian and for a brief time Rickmansworth resident, will, despite her atheism, be doing the same from beyond the grave, and particularly this evening as the provincial and still unfashionable Sky Blues face the glamorous, wealthy and metropolitan might of champions Arsenal.