THE private railway system has, so far, seen many tens of billions of public money thrown at it to make sure that the private companies make big profits and take no risks.
Currently, £87 million of the public’s money is spent on it every week of the year.
Yesterday, despite this massive public funding the House of Commons Transport Committee reported that passengers are being driven away from the railways by the train operators ‘exorbitant fares’.
The committee found that the private companies had brought the system into disrepute through their ‘single-minded’ pursuit of profits, which held passengers to ransom, and sought to ‘see how much we can get away with’, including not giving the public value for money.
The private companies enjoy billions of public subsidy every year, combined with the profits from exorbitant fares.
Rail privatisation has functioned as a government backed license for the rail privateers to make lots of money, with the public taking all the risks, including safety risks, as it provides its profits guarantee.
In fact, even the House of Commons Committee criticised the government for favouring the private companies against the public by refusing to ensure that the public got value for its money.
The report states: ‘The privatised industry has had more than a decade to get fares and ticketing right, and it has proven incapable of doing so. Passengers are held to ransom by a system that is deeply flawed.’
It emphasised that ‘The situation is deeply unacceptable’ with the companies getting up to all kinds of dodges to screw more money out of the public. MPs found that the cost of tickets bought on the day of travel were ‘absurdly high’.
The report went so far as to state that the ‘see how much we can get away with attitude’ has put thumbscrews on passengers who have no option but to travel on peak-hour trains using ‘fully flexible open fares’, and that such behaviour ‘has brought not only individual train operators but the passenger railways in general into disrepute.’
Further, the committee found that the privateer focused on the holiday periods in order to maximise profits.
The committee had the ‘distinct impression that the frequently chaotic rush for limited numbers of good value seats on departures other than the most unsocial hours is positively encouraged by train operators, perhaps because it leads passengers to buy more expensive fares than would be the case if the purchasing arrangements were more straightforward.’
The committee urged that the government must ‘flex its muscles’ so passengers got a fair deal.
However here the committee reveals its stupidity.
The privatisation of the railways was carried out by the Tories and continued by Blair and Brown to provide the private companies with a sure thing, with massive subsidies and guaranteed profits, and no risk. The only risk being to the public.
Not even the use of contractors resulting in a series of rail disasters could dampen the ardour of the Blair government for rail privatisation.
The policy, far from being radical, innovative and groundbreaking is conservative and deeply reactionary. It is simply one to provide big business with a sure-fire method of making huge profits at a time of a growing crisis for capitalism.
The policy was a way of getting the pigs to the profiteering trough, through a massively conservative profit making scheme, financed by the state, at the expense of the fare paying, tax paying working population.
This is now so well known that even the Labour Party conference has called repeatedly for rail renationalisation and has been ignored by the Blair capitalist government, which only listens to big business.
The House of Commons report is a reminder that safe, cheap, efficient and modern railway transport requires the immediate renationalisation of the railways.
