Burnham Rail Attack Fail

For someone who has advised Labour figures all the way up to the blessed Tone, John McTernan spends an awful lot of time hovering somewhere out there on the right. There he is talking to Policy Exchange, Young Dave’s favourite “think tank” until Tim Leunig had his brainstorm and announced that northern cities were a failure and everyone ought to move to London, and there again he writes for the increasingly piss-poor Telegraph.

Here, McTernan has decided to lay into leadership hopeful Andy Burnham, over the latter’s rail policy. He starts as he means to go on - getting it wrong: “There are many stupid ways to waste public money, but surely none is more stupid than the idea of renationalising the railways. Labour leadership contender Andy Burnham has announced that he is committed to this ridiculous, wasteful and unnecessary policy”. Sadly for McTernan, Burnham has not committed to renationalisation. But do go on.

“The first thing to point out is that railway privatisation has worked. And worked brilliantly. Just take the simplest measure - passenger numbers. Every year they break new records. Check the statistics: the rise started at the point of privatisation”. Er, no: passenger numbers were already rising. And the sell-offs did not happen all at once, but over a number of years. Then we get a real whopper.

“Competition between rail companies has created new journeys which have generated new passengers”. Bullshit. Almost all the rail services operating on the national network are specified as part of the operator’s franchise conditions. The only exceptions are two small open access operators working on the East Coast Main Line.

But he’s not done yet: “it costs money to nationalise private property”. Burnham is still not proposing that (see his manifesto HERE). Do go on. “Just take over franchises as they lapse, goes the argument. Well, it's just not that simple. Running a railway company – public or private – does cost money. There are staff. And management. And extra Department for Transport civil servants to oversee everything”.

Soil the bed, this is wilful rubbish. Staff transfer from one operator to another as franchises change. What Burnham has cited is the model of Directly Operated Railways, which had to step in when National Express threw in the towel on the East Coast franchise. McTernan is still not convinced: “there is the loss of the savings created by competitive tendering for routes”, but once again, Burnham is not excluding that.

There’s more: “And you have still left the railways in private hands because the trains will still be owned by Train Operating Companies”. Again, Burnham is not suggesting otherwise. And what McTernan misses completely is that Network Rail - the company that owns and runs the track and signalling - is already nationalised. Franchised services are specified by Government, as is the rolling stock that will be used to run them.

And I somehow doubt that Andy Burnham will be taking lessons from someone whose latest involvement with Labour was with the Scottish party in the run-up to May’s General Election. That went well, didn’t it? Some of these ex-advisors do get terribly bitter.