TERRIBLE TRAINS AND A DRUGS EPIDEMIC

A: Useless MPs haven’t a clue how to solve them

INSTEAD of wasting time on an election where nobody has anything interesting to offer, let’s worry about some things that really matter – for example, the way this country is being sold to foreign governments and companies. don’t think any other nation would put up with this. Why do we? The most ridiculous is the way our trains – devastated by John Major’s mad privatisation scheme – are falling into the hands of foreign state railways.

So, while the Government cannot bear to have railways run by the British state, it is happy to have them run by the German, Dutch, French or even Hong Kong state systems.

Yes, that’s right. Your journey to work may well be on a train operated by Abellio, part of the Dutch state railway, Deutsche Bahn, Germany’s state railway, SNCF, the French state railway, or Hong Kong’s MTR. And this is the country that invented the railway and once exported equipment and skills around the world.

And last week it emerged that SNCF is bidding to operate HS2, a pointless vanity line that should have been cancelled long ago but which the Government is too weak to abandon. So we might be hiring a foreign state railway to run a service we don’t even need, while Britain is full of sizeable towns with no railway station, which could be linked to the national system for a tiny part of the cost of HS2.

What is going on? What principle is at work here? Privatised railways have never been real private companies. Their jaws are clamped firmly to the public teat, and when they fail they can just stroll away from the mess they have made.

The increase in traffic they claim to have brought about was in fact caused by the hopeless overcrowding of roads and insane house prices, which produced a great surge in long-distance commuting.

I have been a long-distance commuter myself for more than 30 years and I long for the return of British Rail. Its undoubted arrogance and sloth were as nothing compared with its private successors, and its trains were faster and more comfortable.

It looked after its track far better and – given the money – it would never have made the mess its successors are now making of electrifying the Great Western line, which is years behind schedule, partly abandoned and vastly over budget.

Yet in the 20 years to 2013, state subsidies to the rail sector roughly tripled in real terms, while fares continued to rise. This is a small slice of our national life of which I have direct daily experience. None of it works properly.

I am apologised to, meaninglessly, by computerised voices, a dozen times a day. They do the same thing hours or days later. Nobody is really sorry. My trains are almost always late, frequently very badly so. But they get more expensive all the time. It’s the same in so many areas of life, and those responsible are protected from us by call centres and unresponsive websites, which only talk to us when they want to.

Yet this problem, and the problem of the takeover of our remaining industries by foreign concerns, isn’t seriously addressed or discussed by any of the major parties. The same is true – for example – of the needless power crisis caused by Green zealotry, and the stealthy legalisation of dangerous drugs.

I have ceased to be furious about all this, because it only made me unhappy. I now just observe and record it, as if it were a disaster that had already happened. Just don’t tell me that we have a ‘strong and stable’ Government. I can put up with Mrs May saying she’s not as bad as the alternative. That’s probably true, except if she decides to have a war. But the idea that our rulers have any idea what they are doing, or can be trusted with our national future, is a joke.

They’re just hoping the bailiffs don’t turn up before the Election. But if they do, what have we got left to sell, to pay our bills?