>The government doesn't want it:
>Private investors don't want it:
>Europe doesn't want it:
>No one thinks there's a balance to be made between revenue/expenses:
>Why do you have trains at all?
Which is a good question.
First let's ask why does the government say that they want it when there actions say otherwise. I think they are appealing to a sentiment that says rail travel is an ecologically sound form of mass transportation while steadily rising car use is unsustainable.
For myself, that seems like a bad argument. Increasing car use is not a tide that can be turned by the 'good intentions' of green utopians. It arises out of social changes that would be difficult - and wrong - to try to turn back. They are falling motor costs, rising incomes, more dispersed living and so on. Worse, the government's attitude is cynical, because it is really about hostility to cars, not a positive support for rail.
And Jordan is right to draw the conclusion that the market for rail travel cannot sustain the kind of investment needed for a viable railway, leading to a spiralling decline in quality > passengers > investment > quality ...
That said, I would argue that the rail network ought to be subsidised as a public service. Put simply, South East England would be permanently grid-locked if the commuter traffic were all redirected to the road network. Worse still, the financial district in the City, now recognised as London's one growth industry, draws its workforce largely from people commuting from Essex by train to Liverpool Street. Without trains we would be cutting our own throats (perhaps a blessing to the rest of the world, but that's their business, at least for the purposes of this argument).
That market solutions should diverge from human need is not so strange a proposal, is it? The rail network is not profitable, but it serves a human good - just not in proportion to its costs. The reason is that it is dependent upon an artificially restricted wage fund as the basis of its market. Other goods like housing and health are similarly underdeveloped, so we tend to resolve the problem through public provision.
This morning Tony Blair admitted as such when he said that with hindsight it would have made more sense to nationalise the railways in 1997, but that that would have been interpreted as a return to 'old Labour'. Blair's candour, though, leads to an obvious conclusion. Plainly the ideological commitment to the privatisation programme, a commitment that he was personally responsible for forcing through, was hogwash. And if he really means that nationalisation was the right answer, then he ought to have supported Arthur Scargill's Socialist Labour Party in 1997 against his own 'New' Labour. But lacking even coherence, let alone principle, Blair will continue to celebrate his own victory over the Labour Party constitution's commitment to nationalisation ('Clause IV') as a defining moment in the creation of the 'new model' Labour Party, even as he argues that nationalisation was the answer for the railways.
(Just as an aside, anyone who thinks that nationalisation = socialism should look at the history of the nationalised industry's treatment of its own employees throughout the period 1945 - 1995.)
-- James Heartfield Sustaining Architecture in the Anti-Machine Age is available at GBP19.99, plus GBP3.26 p&p from Publications, audacity.org, 8 College Close, Hackney, London, E9 6ER. Make cheques payable to 'Audacity Ltd'. www.audacity.org