A People's Railway is just the ticket

This Public Ownership column, by CPO co-founder Neil Clark, appears in the Morning Star.

A People's Railway is just the ticket.

"Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"
"To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."
"The dog did nothing in the night-time."
"That was the curious incident," remarked Sherlock Holmes.

Rather like the non-barking dog in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's classic detective story Silver Blaze, the most curious incident regarding our three main parties manifesto promises on Britain's railways is not what they have said, but what they haven't said.

The Labour Party boasts of its commitment to "a new high-speed rail line linking North and South" and says it will "press ahead with a major investment programme in existing rail services." Labour will "encourage more people to switch to rail" and promises to "treble the number of secure cycle storage spaces at rail stations."
The Tories pledge to "reform our railways to provide a better focus on tackling problems that matter most to passengers, like overcrowding." They will "grant longer, more flexible franchises to incentivise private sector investment in improvements like longer trains and better stations."

The Lib Dems, meanwhile, promise a "rail renaissance, reopening closed railway lines and new stations and building a high-speed network to cut journey times to Scotland and the north of England."

Have you spotted something? Not one of our three major parties mentions the single most important measure that would improve our fragmented, unreliable and ludicrously expensive railway network - taking the entire network back into public ownership.
Seeing that over 70 per cent of the public want to bring back British Rail, you would have thought that at least one of our three leading parties would advocate such a measure.

But in the same way that the non-barking dog revealed to Sherlock Holmes the solution to the mystery of Silver Blaze, so the parties' reluctance to even discuss renationalisation reveals to us the sordid truth about British "democracy." Namely, that it isn't the people who decide what gets into party manifestos, but capital.

Let's look to Austria

The difference between how a publicly owned transport system and a privately owned one operates was graphically illustrated to my family and I on a recent journey back from Austria.

We were staying for a few days in a little town in the Alps. We took a train from the town to Salzburg's main railway station. The journey lasted two-and-three-quarter hours and cost just over 9 euros (£7.90) each. The train had plenty of free seats and we had legroom which seemed to be almost double the size of that we get on trains back home in Britain.

We then took a bus from Salzburg railway station to Salzburg airport, a 20-minute ride which cost 2 euros (£1.75) each. The train was punctual to the second, as was the bus.

Indeed, in all my journeys in Austria down the years I have never known a train or bus to be late, despite them sometimes having to deal with atrocious winter weather conditions.

How different to the way transport operates in privatised Britain.

On arriving back at our British airport, we were informed that the National Express coach to take us home would not be arriving as it had broken down. We, along with the other passengers, had to wait another 25 minutes before another coach, picked us up to take us to Luton airport, from where we had to change to get on yet another coach.

Almost every time I or a family member travels with National Express, something likes this happens. How is that Austria's State Railways and the country's Postbuses can operate so efficiently, while National Express is so dreadful?

Neoliberals love to claim that anything run by the state is inefficient and anything privately run is efficient. In fact very often the opposite is true.

What makes the National Express travel experience even more galling is the knowledge that the company has received around £2.5bn in taxpayers' subsidies over the past 10 years - and it pays us back with such an appalling service.

As RMT general secretary Bob Crow says, National Express has been taking us all for a ride - though not a very punctual or comfortable one.

Things could get even worse. Thatcherite fanatics in the EU Commission seem hell-bent on destroying Europe's excellent public transport and in the name of "increasing competition" force through, against the public's wishes, the privatisation of railway and bus services.

The prospect of rip-off, inefficient British companies like National Express running trains and buses in Austria at some time in the future is a truly appalling one. It falls to us to build a pan-European pro-public ownership movement to make sure it never happens.

Targetting Hungarian railways

Hungary's state-owned railway MAV has had a tough time of it in the past few years. Starved of investment by the country's faux-left, ultra-Blairite government, around 10 per cent of lines have been closed and ticket prices have risen sharply. But despite the very welcome defeat of Hungary's corrupt, serial-privatising and pro-war "Socialists" at the weekend, worse could be to come not just for MAV but for Hungary's long-suffering people.

Ninety-three heirs of Hungarian Holocaust survivors have filed a lawsuit at a Chicago court against MAV for $240 million damages and $1 billion non-asset compensation.

They claim that MAV had provided its carriages being fully aware that these would be used to transport 437,000 Jews to the gas chambers in Auschwitz in 1944 and accused the company of looting their ancestors' possessions. The case is due to be heard on April 22.

The Holocaust was an unspeakably heinous crime, but is it right that in 2010 Hungary's railways should be held responsible for the atrocities of Hungary's pro-nazi collaborationist government nearly 70 years ago?

If the lawsuit succeeds it will not only mean the end of MAV and job losses for its 20,000 employees, but, as the railway is in public hands, even more hardship for ordinary Hungarians, who are reeling after years of cutbacks in health care, pensions and welfare provision.

With poverty and malnutrition rising in Hungary, the cuts in public spending which would follow the success of the lawsuit would inevitably lead to the premature deaths of innocent people who had nothing whatsoever to do with the horrible events of World War II.

It's good to hear that Jewish community leader Peter Feldmajer has criticised the lawsuit, saying: "No legal action can be brought against MAV on moral grounds."

Even if it does win the case, cash-strapped MAV has resigned itself to spending up to 45m forints (around £150,000) on legal fees to defend itself against the lawsuit.

Hopefully common sense will prevail and, instead of facing closure or more cutbacks, Hungary's state railway will win the case and get a better deal from the country's new leadership.

The Final Chapter for Libraries?

This column on public ownership, by CPO co-founder Neil Clark, appears in the Morning Star.

The NHS is a great example of socialism in action. Public libraries are another. The idea of a place where all members of the community can go to borrow books which are communally owned is a quite wonderful one and totally at odds with neoliberal ideology, which prefers private - and not public - provision.
This is probably why, in this age of neoliberalism, public libraries in Britain are under grave threat.
A new report by the Valuation Office Agency showed that Britain has lost nearly 200 public libraries since 1997.
The number of books available to be borrowed has fallen dramatically - by 13 million in the period 2003-9. And worse could be to come, with swingeing cutbacks in local government spending likely to reduce the library service still further.
Part of the problem with the decline in libraries is that a new generation of people, brought up in an age obsessed with private ownership, prefer to buy books from bookshops rather than borrow them free of charge from their local library.
In 1979, by contrast, two-and-a-half times as many books were loaned by libraries than were bought at bookshops.
It's revealing that older people - brought up in a more collectivist era - use public libraries much more than younger Britons whose formative years were in an acquisitive society where private ownership became our country's new religion.
To reverse the decline in public libraries, therefore, we don't just have to increase spending on them. We need to change the whole ethos of our society to one where people once again relish sharing communally owned goods.

Hoping for change in Germany

One of the most disappointing political events of the last year in western Europe was the return to government in Germany, after an 11-year absence, of the fanatically pro-big business Free Democratic Party (FDP).
The FDP, a partner in the current Christian Democrat (CDU)-led coalition, favours massive cuts in public spending, cuts in the top rate of income tax and further privatisation.
The new German government has stated its intention to proceed with a partial privatisation of the country's state-owned railway Deutsche Bahn.
But the good news is that the plan has met opposition from within the government itself.
Transport Minister Peter Ramsauer - a member of the Christian Social Union party, the Bavarian sister party of Angela Merkel's CDU - said he was not prepared to "squander economic assets" and blamed privatisation plans for the deterioration in services on the Deutsche Bahn-owned S-Bahn in Berlin.
The battle going on within the German government is one between fanatical neoliberals - the FDP - and the more moderate conservative protectors of the Rhineland model.
Let's hope the latter, with help from unions and the German left, can defeat the former and keep Germany's excellent publicly owned railway on track. And let's hope too that the stay in government of the extremist FDP is extremely short-lived.

Tackling the real problem in the NHS

The script is a familiar one. Before a state-owned enterprise is privatised, it is necessary to convince the public that the enterprise in question is failing to deliver the goods and is in urgent need of "reform."
That's what happened in the 1990s with British Rail. And it's what's happening today with the NHS.
Anti-NHS propagandists have made great capital out of a recent report on the failures at Stafford hospital, where at least 400 patients were held to have died due to substandard conditions and care in the period between 2005-8.
But as Unite's national officer for health David Fleming has pointed out, Stafford's problems were not caused by public ownership but by the obsession with what he describes as the "target-obsessed privatisation culture."
Stafford hospital was run by the Mid-Staffordshire Foundation Trust. The Department of Health claims that foundation trusts are "at the cutting edge of the government's commitment to the decentralisation of public services" - which is neoliberal-speak for "they are a great back-door way to achieve privatisation of the NHS."
With their commercialised, profit-obsessed approach - and their £180k chief executives - foundation trusts are inimical to the very ethos of Nye Bevan's NHS.
Last month it was revealed that Royal Surrey County NHS Foundation Trust made a profit of over £300,000 in one year by selling abroad £4m of drugs intended for use in Britain.
The best way to make sure that the deaths at Stafford are not repeated is to scrap foundation trusts and restore the NHS to its original, 1940s socialist ideals, where the needs of patients are put before profits. And that also means bringing all ancillary services, such as cleaning and catering, back in-house.

End the annual energy profits charade

It's become an annual event. Britain's privatised energy companies announce enormous profits having failed to pass on the reduced price of gas to consumers.
Cue harsh criticism from Ofgem and expressions of shock and outrage from politicians and media commentators.
Meanwhile things carry on as before, with the privatised companies continuing to fleece the public.
The one thing that will put an end to this annual charade is the measure that none of our three major parties, still wedded to Thatcherite dogma, will even contemplate - the renationalisation of Britain's entire energy sector.
Public limited companies will always put the interests of shareholders before the interests of the general public. If we want the interests of the public to come before profits, we must have public ownership. It really is as simple as that.

Michael Foot: A strong supporter of public ownership

"Socialism without public ownership is nothing but a fantastic apology."

Michael Foot, writing in the Daily Herald, 1956.

You can read CPO co-founder Neil Clark's First Post tribute to the late leader of the Labour Party here.

Press Release on the obscene profiteering of Britain's energy companies

According to the new report from the energy regulator Ofgem, Britain’s privatised energy suppliers are making more than £100 out of every customer by refusing to cut bills during the record freeze.

They are now making an average profit of more than £105 a year from every dual-fuel customer.

The wholesale price of gas fell by around 60 per cent between 2008 and 2009. But suppliers chose not to cut customer tariffs before the winter - meaning a profit bonanza of £846 million a month.

The Campaign for Public Ownership believes that the only long-term solution to the problem of energy company profiteering is to restore the energy companies to public ownership.

The problem lies in the ownership structure of the energy companies. All of them are Public Limited Companies, whose overriding aim is to maximise profits for shareholders. That's what PLCs do. Instead of reacting with horror to the entirely predictable news that PLCs are putting the interests of shareholders before Britain's long-suffering energy consumers, we should instead be calling for the government to take the one step that will lead to lower energy prices in the long term. Restoring the energy companies to public ownership will mean that prices can be lowered, as there will be no shareholder dividends to pay.

The NHS under threat: the first private operator of a general hospital

Will Stone in the Morning Star reports:

One of five firms is set to carve a damaging scar onto the face of the NHS by becoming the first private operator of a general hospital - a prospect experts have labelled as "the last nail in the coffin" for the health service.

Hinchingbrooke in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, lost its only NHS bidder earlier this week in the Cambridge University Hospitals Trust, whose withdrawal has opened the way for one of five private health providers to take control.

Once the contract is awarded by the East of England health authority, Hinchingbrooke will become the first NHS hospital of its kind in Britain to be operated by a private firm.

The hospital has been labelled as "debt-ridden" with a deficit of around £40 million, but Unison head of health Karen Jennings claimed the debt is "no worse than many other trusts" which are bogged down in private contracts.

She described plans to hand over the running of the hospital to a private company as a "dangerous experiment" which flew in the face of the government's insistence that the NHS is its preferred provider.

The unfunny joke of energy policy

This column, by CPO co-founder Neil Clark was published in the Morning Star.

Writing in the Observer in 2004, Anthony Barnett told of a little game that the fanatically free-market minister Nigel Lawson used to play when he was energy secretary in the early 1980s.

Lawson would turn up at energy conferences to give speeches entitled "UK Energy Policy" and then proudly announce that the government didn't have an energy policy.
How very droll. What a great wit that Lawson was. Except that now nobody is laughing.

Britain faces a very real energy crisis - and it's a crisis which has been caused by adherence to free-market dogma.

In its recent report, the energy regulator Ofgem - previously so enthusiastic about the "liberalisation" of the energy market - warned that the free-market approach to energy which successive British governments have followed since the 1980s will leave us short of energy supplies by 2015.

Ofgem said that only increased state intervention - in the shape of a new state-controlled energy buyer to sell gas and electricity to consumers - would be able to keep the lights on.

But as welcome as Ofgem's report is, it doesn't go anywhere near far enough. Ofgem still envisages a future for our privatised energy companies.

But as long as energy companies remain privately owned, they will continue to profiteer at our expense and put their short-term profits ahead of Britain's longer-term energy concerns.

This winter, the coldest in Scotland since 1914 and the coldest in many other parts of Britain since 1981, the energy companies once again have shown their true colours.

The wholesale price of gas fell by around 60 per cent between 2008 and 2009. But suppliers chose not to cut customer tariffs before the winter - meaning a profit bonanza of £846 million a month.

Public ownership of the entire energy sector would not only mean lower bills, as there would be no shareholders' noses in the trough, but it would enable Britain to make sensible long-term plans regarding its energy policy for the future. Either that or we'd better make sure we're well stocked up on logs and candles.


This week marks the centenary of the comedian and singer Joyce Grenfell, one of Britain's best-loved entertainers.

Grenfell (right), whose aunt was Lady Nancy Astor, the first woman MP to sit in the House of Commons, had a privileged upper-class upbringing, but like so many, her political outlook changed in World War II.

"The more I see people brought up the easy way," she wrote, "the more I incline to socialism. Things will never - can never - be the same as they were before the war."

And things were not the same as they were before the war. A Labour government with public ownership high up on its agenda launched the greatest programme of nationalisation in this country's history.

There are legitimate criticisms to make of the way it went about things, not least the overgenerous compensation that was paid to the railway owners.

But by the end of its period in office the fact remains that around 20 per cent of the British economy was in public ownership.

That remained the case for almost 30 years, until the Thatcher government began its work of overturning the post-war settlement.

Ironically Thatcher came to power in 1979 - the year that Grenfell died.

I'm sure that if Grenfell returned to life today she would be horrified and saddened at how all the achievements of the post-war era have been destroyed.



They've sold off our energy, our transport, our airports and our natural resources.

Now it's time to flog off the few remaining ports that remain in public ownership.

The historic port of Dover is being earmarked for sale, with the Nord de Palais District Council in France reported as being the main bidder.

The News of the World revealed that the government is being advised by merchant bank NM Rothschild. A source at the investment bank said: "This is an exciting sale. Selling Dover to Calais is a very logical move as that is where most of the business is directed."

Well, selling Dover to Calais for £350m may be an "exciting sale" and "logical move" for merchant banks like NM Rothschild, which has made enormous fortunes from privatisation down the years, but for the rest of us it is a sign of how financial concerns trump all other considerations in modern Britain.

Dover is a port which has played a key role in British history. Its white cliffs are a symbol of our defiance against the nazis in World War II, but all that counts for nothing as far as the money men are concerned.

The big scandal is not that Dover is being sold to the French - as the prospective Tory candidate for the town Charles Elphicke seems to think - but that it is being sold at all. Ports are national strategic assets and should be nationally owned.

"The port should absolutely stay in British hands. It always has been and it should always be. It means so much to the boys who have sailed away from it and come back," said Dame Vera Lynn, forces sweetheart and singer of the classic The White Cliffs of Dover. Dame Vera is understandably incensed by news of the sale.
"How could they even think about selling it off? It is not right. Dover is part of England. It simply can't be part of anywhere else."

But for the global money men the whole idea of "national" ownership is anathema. All that matters to them is whether they can make a quick profit.

'"Tories to allow National Express into rail franchise market"

From The New Statesman.

The Conservative party will reportedly allow the transport group to re-enter the rail franchise market if it wins this year's election
National Express is likely to be allowed to bid for contracts in two years' time. This would be contrary to the Labour government's plan which has vowed to banish the group from the rail market after the £1.4bn East Coast debacle.
The bus-and-coach giant had to hand its East Coast rail service back to the government after huge losses. It was also ordered to give up its East Anglia rail franchises in March 2011. John Devaney, National Express' group chairman, has reportedly met with Conservative transport team members for discussions.
A Conservative Party spokesman said the East Coast debacle "certainly doesn't make it easy for National Express to make a rapid return to the franchise market at the next round. They will need to work hard to rebuild their credibility".
It is likely that National Express will have to sit out the next round of franchising, but would be allowed to bid for contracts in 2012 and 2013, he added.