I am currently reading Ghost stations: essays and branchlines by Patrick McLoughlin. 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.
So McLoughlin 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 McLoughlin’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
McLoughlin. 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 McLoughlin 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.
