Corbyn’s model railway
Should the trains be nationalised? Page 6
It’s not much of a scandal as scandals go, said Dominic Sandbrook in the Daily Mail. Last month Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn had himself filmed sitting on the corridor floor of a Virgin train. The 11am from King’s Cross to Newcastle was so “ram-packed”, he told the cameraman, that he couldn’t get a seat – a problem, he added, that commuters face every day. But this, it turns out, was a lie. Days later, Virgin boss Richard Branson released CCTV footage showing there were, in fact, plenty of empty seats. It was a trivial lie, but then, trivial lies tell you a lot about a person. This one “demolished” Corbyn’s claim to be a new kind of politician, one who eschews spin of any kind. “Traingate”, as this mini-scandal has been dubbed, also reveals him to be so incompetent he couldn’t even stage a proper photo op: “drunk on self-righteousness” and removed from reality, he and his aides didn’t even have the nous to realise that the 11am from King’s Cross to Newcastle carries no commuters and is never overcrowded.
Be that as it may, there’s no denying the appalling overcrowding that afflicts much of our privatised train system, said Owen Jones in The Guardian. On many morning services into London, one in three passengers has to stand. It’s also absurdly expensive. A train ticket to Leeds bought on the day of travel will cost you £98.70: you could fly to Paris for £62. Far from engaging in a foolish stunt, Corbyn was highlighting the need to put trains back into public ownership – a policy backed by 58% of the British public. It isn’t some hare-brained lefty scheme: across Europe trains are publicly run, and they’re cheaper and more efficient than our own. But we’ve already renationalised a large part of the system, said Richard Wellings in The Daily Telegraph, and it has proved disastrous. In 2002, Railtrack, the private company that ran the railway tracks, was replaced by the state-owned Network Rail. And the result? “Waste, delays and mismanagement have become endemic. Flagship projects are late and over budget; the company’s debt is now £41bn despite £4bn a year in subsidies.”
In point of fact, safety and punctuality, “the two key factors for passengers”, have vastly improved under Network Rail, said The Observer. But that’s only thanks to the vast sum the state pays into the system (£3.5bn in 2014-15) to supplement the money from fares (£8.8bn). Set against that, the £222m the private operators pay out in dividends is chicken feed. So it’s an illusion to imagine that nationalising them will lead to corresponding improvements in seat availability and reduced ticket prices. The issue is essentially one of funding, not ownership. Either taxpayers must stump up more in subsidy, or costs must be taken out of the system. Yet when Southern Rail tried to do just that by introducing trains without guards, it got hammered by the rail unions. Will Corbyn really want to take them on? The private operators haven’t been much good, but if he wants to see improvements under a state-run service, Corbyn must first work out how he plans to pay for them.