On romanticising nationalised railways...

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.

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 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.