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| A Northern Rail Class 156 Sprinter, calls at Castleton Moor on the Esk Valley Railway with a Whitby to Middlesbrough service. This line was saved quite arbitrarily from the Beeching cuts of the 1960s, and yet for 20 years since privatisation has seen only a couple of trains per day in each direction. Unforgivably, none of these services are suitable for commuting to either of the line's termini. This railway awaits an imaginative and innovative operator who will maximise its undoubted potential at the heart of the North Yorkshire Moors National Park. |
In last week's post Privatisation Profiteers Ride the Rails (at your expense), ANDY FLEMING examined the Tories'
In
the last post in this series he examines why Britain's rail network now the
most fragmented and expensive in Western Europe to both passenger and tax payer
alike, has become a cash cow to train operating companies who reap the
profits, while you and I pay the losses.
Following
the botched privatisation of British Rail in 1994, hopes were high that a
change to a New Labour government in 1997 would see re-nationalisation of this
strategic national asset in a country crying out for an affordable, reliable,
safe and fully integrated environmentally-friendly public transport system.
But
of course we didn’t see any such change. The key was in the word ‘New’. What we
received was just a continuation of Major’s full-baked policies in railways and
elsewhere, just different cronies enacting them. Sure there was the odd left
winger full of bluster who was ready to drop all of their principals, in order
to give the impression that there may be a little socialisation of the economy
but of course it was a mirage. As would become clear following Tony Blair and
George Bush’s illegal Iraq War of 2003, the petroleum industry was still pulling
the strings despite the environmental rhetoric and run-ins with hard working
truck drivers.
This
phoney environmentalism was however a deceitful and duplicitous way of launching
a full scale assault on the motorist with crippling petrol taxes, while simultaneously
John Prescott was announcing an investment in railways so grand that the
Victorians would have been jealous. It was of course all lies. Most of the £30
billion funding for the network announced in early 1999 wasn’t new money at
all, just recycled promises from the last days of Major’s corrupt and sleazy
administration. New Labour were of course masters of lies, dishonesty and
deceit (these grotesque human traits were of course spun as ‘spin’ to the
gullible).
It
was brought home to me one night when BBC Look North carried a visit by Tony
Blair to a primary school in Ferryhill, part of his Sedgefield constituency.
One little girl asked the Prime Minister a fantastic question that deserved a
fully honest answer.
“Please
can you re-open Ferryhill station as there are a lot of people here who can’t
afford cars”, she said.
His
answer would be the reason why I wouldn’t vote Labour ever again,
“I’d
love to be in a position to do it, but it would be just far too expensive”.
It
was clear where this charlatan’s loyalties lay and they certainly weren’t with
his constituents’ needs in a civilised society for even a basic public
transport system. And he certainly couldn’t care less about the environment.
