Just imagine a politician of any political persuasion saying, maybe in the House of Commons, maybe on Question Time, this following sentence:
“I propose that the people of Great Britain should pay more for their train journeys and that extra money should be given to our European friends and neighbours so that they can enjoy cheaper rail travel with our subsidy.”
It is utterly unthinkable. Imagine the Daily Mail headlines! And yet that is the reality of how our railways have been run in this country.
And that is why I am utterly delighted to see the passenger railway services (public ownership) bill pass into law for people in Middlesbrough and Thornaby East and across the country.
Passenger railway services (public ownership) bill
In 2016 I was tasked as Shadow Transport Secretary to develop Labour’s public ownership policy and was honoured to deliver Labour’s comprehensive plan for an integrated railway in public ownership and I wholeheartedly congratulate Lou Haigh on bringing that ambition to fruition.
Public ownership will bring to an end the ridiculous practice of UK taxpayers subsidising other nation states to run our trains in Britain and pump that money into their home transport systems.
This will at long last enable the phased process of bringing train operations back into public ownership and control where they belong.
The point of the bill is not simply to take over the worst franchises, but it is to recognise that the private operation of the passenger rail service has been delivering a poor service for passengers in general.
And the remedy is to return all passenger franchises to public ownership and closer control.
The British public have spoken on this issue at the last election and if you look at any of the research analysis or surveys, it is abundantly clear that not only the vast majority of the British public want to take our railways back into public ownership and control, the majority of Conservative supporters wanted the same thing – despite their MPs opposing it in Parliament.
In the Commons Tory MPs have spoken of this being ideological. I just ask them to cast their mind back to 1993. If ever there was an act of ideology it was the Railways Act of that year when John Major took a step that even she, whose portrait must be removed, wasn’t prepared to take. His predecessor had recognised that that was a ridiculous step to take.
Since then we have seen massive dividends paid out to Nederlandse Spoorwegen, Deutsche Bahn – to every other nation state on the planet who could subsidise their own transport systems because of the ridiculous system imposed upon our railway in this country by the Conservative Party.
Rather than serving passengers and performance, what we got was money shipping out of our system for decades subsidising other nation states transport systems.
We are correcting that and rightly so.
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