Ed’s one-way ticket

Miliband has also been busy ‘looking at options’ for renationalising Britain’s railways at the end of current franchise contracts. This is yet another of what I have called Labour’s ‘targeted tweets’ designed to please trade unions and pick off loose voters — in this case disgruntled south–eastern commuters. What it’s not is a credible, costed policy. Even Ed Balls is said to be distancing himself from such a retrograde idea, while Martin Griffiths, chief executive of the Stagecoach transport group, rightly called it ‘a one-way ticket to higher taxes’ and others in the industry point out that there could be no quicker way to kill existing plans for investment in better trains.

The Miliband case, if we can dignify it thus, is based on the relative success of the East Coast service run by Directly Operated Railways, the ‘arm’s length company’ created by the Department for Transport in 2009 when National Express threw in the towel.