What Labour can learn from the glory days of British Rail

The Department for Transport has just launched an eight-week consultation to determine the shape of its much-vaunted Great British Railways – our renationalised railway system. Will it, I wonder, be anything like the earlier nationalised incarnation, British Rail (BR)? I do hope so. Because, although BR was disparaged for being old-fashioned and a bit creaky, inefficient and loss-making, I was very fond of those trains of yesteryear.

John Major’s privatisation of the railways in the 1990s was meant to introduce competition, improve services and reduce costs. It didn’t work out that way though, did it? Trains today have never been so unreliable or so expensive. Not to mention overcrowded. So, champion of free market capitalism though I am, in this instance I think we can let the state have another go.

My warm feelings towards dear old British Rail come from the fact that, back in the 1970s, I frequently took trains as part of my first job as a journalist: staff writer on the weekly Local Government Chronicle.