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Paul Marks takes a radical view of Britain’s transport system
No one has yet explained to me why the railways could not have been sold as a single unit.
If it had been more efficient to brake up British Rail into regional companies then the new owners would have done just that. Just as if it had been more efficient for the rail to be owned by one company, and have the trains run by other companies this is what would have evolved via the choices of people buying and selling shares (“market forces” are, of course, simply the choices of people engaged in trading). There was certainly no need for the government to engage in complicated schemes – just sell the thing and stand back.
People often talk for the need for subsidies for the railways to compete with the roads (and, to a lesser extent, the airlines) – but whilst I am pleased to accept the fact that the railways and roads do compete for custom (which rather undermines the idea that the railways must be compulsorily broken up to ensure “competition”) I think the whole idea that the railways must fall apart without subsidies is false.
Firstly the roads should not be provided “free” (i.e. free at the point of use) by the state. The problem is not that the government builds motorways late – the problem is that it builds them at all. If people want motorways let them build them and charge people to use them (such things as “road tax” should, of course, be abolished). If people really want to build free motorways let them do so – but I doubt charitable people will put up enough money for this idea.
As for the railways – subsidies should be abolished, but so should regulations. The railways have been attacked by regulations as far back as the 19th century (there were such things as profit controls even then), but in 1906 the government basically declared war on the private railways. Putting trade unions above the law of contract (i.e. outside civil interaction) hit British industry badly – but the railways companies were a specific target of the 1906 Act (the Act was, after all, a direct reaction to the “Taff Vale Judgement” in which the courts declared that a railways company had the right to sue a trade union for organised contract breaking). The “Liberal” government of the day also launched a tidal wave of regulations at the railway companies in the period 1906 to 1914. And then (during the First World War) the railways were taken over by the government, maintenance neglected and the system undermined. We should be very wary of making claims such as the idea that the British railway system was the best in the world in 1919 – such claims are not only rather easy for statists to refute, but (more importantly) undermine the libertarian case that regulations and state control have undermined the railways.
Why the history lesson? Simple – after the returning of the railways to a sort of private ownership history repeated itself. First history repeated itself as farce – in that the government of Mr Major did not intend to harm private railway companies with regulations (but did anyway). And then history repeated itself in a straightforward way with the Labour government’s transport boss (Mr Prescott) setting out to undermine the railway companies as much as he could. A policy continued by his supposedly arch “New Labour” successor as transport boss.
Without the regulations the railways might well be able to compete quite well with the roads without any subsidies at all – even if the roads remained free.
And (of course) a railway system without regulations would be a much safer railway system – as it would be clear who was in charge and who was responsible.
Paul Marks
Well, it seems hapless former UK transport minister and all-round-twit Stephen Byers learned the hard way of why the once-magnificent British railway system was to prove his downfall. As they say, it could not have happened to a nicer guy.
Meanwhile, Patrick Crozier, at his excellent UK Transport blog, confesses to being totally surprised at the resignation of Byers. I confess to feeling the same way. But of course I am not kidding myself that anything will change in the quality of our transport network as a result of Byers’ departure. The trains will still be late and dirty, the Tube (underground subway) will still be noisy, late and hot; our roads will be jammed, and the cost of motoring will still be extortionate.
Britain is a member of the Group of Seven industrial nations and yet we have an increasingly third world transportation system.
So he’s gone. Stephen Byers, formerly Secretary of State for the Department of Local Government, Transport and the Regions has resigned. And just when I thought he’d never go. You just can’t tell.
Now, all the speculation is about who should replace him. Should it be invisible Charles Clarke? Or should it be Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon? Neither is about to set the world alight. Of the two, Hoon, would seem to have the best credentials to step into Byers’s shoes: not only can’t he manage the news, but I understand he’s rapidly buggering up the armed forces.
But I have got a much better and simpler idea. One that will almost certainly solve our transport problems.
Abolish the Department.
It only goes back to 1919. Before then we had the best railway in the world. We had already built most of the tube. Electric trams, taximeter cabs and motorised buses plied the streets of the capital looking for trade.
And then Transport got a Ministry and a Minister: Eric Geddes. It got off to a bad start – forcibly re-organising the railways and hamstringing their profits. So started their steady decline. And after the bad start things just got worse. London Transport was nationalised halting development in its tracks. Not satisfied with that they then decided to nationalise the whole railway. The decline just gathered pace. And so on and so forth.
Luckily the Ministry’s incompetence was masked by the growth of road transport. But even there motorways were built too late and in insufficient numbers.
Almost every move the Department has ever made has made things worse: expanding the railway, then cutting it; expanding the road network then slamming on the brakes. They couldn’t get nationalisation right. They couldn’t even get privatisation right.
Politicians are not part of the solution: they are part of the problem.
Patrick Crozier
That’s it, that’s the story. Most libertarians know the arguments for pricing roads sanely instead of insanely. This Sky News report tells us that the RAC (Royal Automobile Club), a big fragment of the British road lobby, now ‘gets it’ as well. Perhaps some of the people there even realise that road pricing, far from being “anti-car”, will in reality usher in a new golden age of the car, and put the present dark age of gridlock behind us.
In his first posting yesterday (Saturday May 4) on UK Transport, Patrick Crozier posts a challenge to libertarians everywhere. Can you build railways without compulsory purchase orders (or what Americans call, I believe, “Eminent Domain” laws)? I’m sure this question has received many answers over the years, but I haven’t come across one I liked. I’d like to. Maybe the answer is that railways are inherently anti-libertarian. If so, a pity, I say. Maybe railways can be run by libertarians, once they exist, but not built by them. Ugh!
And a question to Patrick, with whom I discussed the matter by phone the other day. What is it with airport landing “rights”, awarded, it would seem, by politicians, to the airlines that are cleverest at lobbying? What’s the story there? Surely there should be a market for the right to land (and, presumably, take off). If there was, what would happen? Would prices surge? Would they fluctuate a lot? Is there anywhere which already has such a market?
Patrick Crozier of UK Transport looks at Britain and realises we have seen it all before.
It is an essential service. It has been starved of funds. It is in desparate need of modernisation. Of course, this will require some money but the politicians promise us that after they’ve got the new technology working everything will be as right as rain. Is this the National Health Service (NHS) we’re talking about? No, British Rail in the 1950s.
The railway was clapped out just like the NHS. It had been the pride of the nation – just like the NHS It had faced years of re-organisation coupled with fare control, followed by Depression, followed by War, followed by nationalisation. In an age of diesel and electricity, British trains were powered by steam and the industry was losing money fast. So, they called for a Modernisation Plan and a stack of cash was produced. And in the late 1950s British Rail spent it – just like the NHS is about to. And, boy, did they spend it. They spent it on diesel locomotives, electric locomotives, steam locomotives (would you believe it), marshalling yards, DMUs, EMUs, electrification projects. They commissioned something like 20 different types of locomotive – some of which actually worked. Some of which are rattling around the network to this very day.
But by the early 1960s things were looking bleak. British Rail was still shipping cash even though it was supposed to be breaking even. It seems that people had found alternatives to one-size-fits-all railways. They had bought themselves flexible, go-anywhere-anytime cars and lorries and didn’t need boring old trains anymore. Cue Doctor Beeching. Cue the closure of half the network.
As with the railways, so (up to a point) with the NHS. They will spend the money. Some of their IT projects will work. There will be some nice new hospitals. And in 5 years’ time there will be little else to show for it.
The big difference is customers. British Rail wanted customers. The NHS doesn’t. British Rail didn’t get what it wanted and neither will the NHS. British Rail lost out because there was an alternative. The NHS will lose out because there isn’t. The NHS is going to gouge out the private sector for doctors, nurses and beds. In doing so it will force even more people to suffer its tender mercies. And in 5 years’ time a new Doctor Beeching will have to sort out the mess.
Patrick Crozier
Dr. Tim Evans welcomes ‘Red Ken’ to the world of capitalist rationality… sort of
I have long been an advocate of private roads and road pricing. State ownership of public space and its attendant services such as police beat patrols is madness. Indeed, I have long believed that London and all other geographic areas will only get decent integrated roads and transport systems through genuine private ownership and good old free market price signaling.
What I did not expect was that that doyen of the British left and now Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, would be the man to instigate the transition to such an approach. Let me be clear, Livingstone is planning to introduce road pricing into the capital city early next year. However imperfect his plans will be (and my God, they have some glaring holes at present) and however he seeks to dress this move up with all the usual environmental waffle, the long term affect of his policy of “congestion charging” is going to lead to the commodification of public space. By pricing roads, encouraging an income stream down them and therefore deriving revenue, Livingstone will slowly become addicted to the money.
As he becomes addicted and the approach spreads – already Durham, Cheshire, Milton Keynes, Surrey, Warwickshire, Isle of Wight, Cumbria, South Gloucestershire, Leeds, Hampshire, Derby and at least twenty other areas are already talking to the Department of Transport about introducing road pricing – the incentive for a supply side revolution in roads and public space will mount. For as money pours into the coffers and drivers slip into the psychology of becoming consumers of road space, so there will be ever more pressure to find new ways of generating more income and therefore getting the supply side of public space to meet people’s demands: that is – some semblance of a market approach.
It is with this in mind that the utopian ideas so long espoused by the Libertarian Alliance in such glorious pamphlets as:
LA Economic Notes No. 49, Brian Micklethwait, The Private Ownership of Public Space: The New Age of Rationally Priced Road Use, 1993 *
LA Economic Notes No. 57, Martin Ball, Liberate the Roads! The Benefits that will come from road privatisation, 1994 *
LA Political Notes No. 17, Max More, Private Police and the Free Rider Problem, 1983 *
LA Political Notes No. 40 Chris R. Tame, On the Side of the Angels: A View of Private Policing, 1989 *
LA Political Notes No. 58, Sean Gabb, The Case for Privatising the Police, 1991 *
…will begin to become relevant to everyday experience and discourse. And that in turn could well mean fantastic new private roads and even maintenance work being undertaken with the customer in mind and not the producer interest.
Sure, these new roads might be built underground by private sector companies who put in the latest air purification technology. And yes, the owners of X road might well want to contract with a private security company to breath test one in every 10,000 drivers for excessive alcohol. But hell, that is capitalism. The owners of X road will want to tell customers that this road is the cleanest and safest way to travel.
None of this will happen in the short term. But slowly, step by step, the incentives to engage a market in road provision are mounting. Sod the Queen’s nationalised highway. I want it owned by capitalists. As a driver, I want roads to be appropriately priced and to be served as a customer.
Come to think of it, perhaps that is why those most hard-line privatisers at the Adam Smith Institute had Ken Livingstone visit their offices three times over the last year on the subject of roads?
Come on comrade Ken, scatter those libertarian seeds and take us to the supply side!
Dr. Tim Evans
*= (links requires Adobe Acrobat Reader (or similar pdf reader) which can be downloaded for free)
UK Transport isn’t a blog name to make the heart race, or so Perry and I have been telling Patrick Crozier. Transports of Delight? Freedom Wheels? Libertarian Travelblog? But UK Transport by any other name would smell just as sweet, for just as long as he can keep it going and keep it coming.
For example, among several nice things there was a beautiful little piece there yesterday (Wed April 3) entitled Safety Costs Soar. I know: yawn. But read it. Says Patrick: “There is something of a shifting of the tectonic plates going on in government circles at the moment.” Trust me, this is about more than safety. It is but the grain of sand in the molecular depths of which a whole world is revealed.
 Taking the tube (London’s underground rapid transit system) last night was a nightmare. A delay on one line meant no trains at a rush-hour period for more than 20 minutes. Chaos. Angry crowds. A scene sticks in my mind. A young London Underground staffer, dressed in usual garb of garish blue jacket and hat, was shouting at a vexed young man in a suit, telling him to wait at a certain point. She was using the manner of a particularly authortarian school-marm. Ask yourselves, gentle reader, could such a thing occur in a privately run business, like a food store? I think I know the answer to that one.
London Underground’s new slogan?
I have a friend called Don Riley, who originates from New Zealand. He is a property developer. He owns – lucky man – property next to London’s new Jubilee Line. The Jubilee Line, as everyone in the Anglosphere surely knows, is the latest addition to the tube, that is to say to the London Underground railway system.
Don is also an International Man of Mystery. He’ll tell you all kinds of stories about how he sold computers to the Russians in the seventies, and he still has numerous deeply mysterioso friends from behind the ex-Iron Curtain. He occasionally goes on “birdwatching” expeditions to places like Morocco. So if he isn’t a spook of some ex- or pensioned or maybe even current variety, he has a lot of fun pretending to be.
Last year Don wrote a book, about “public” transport and how to finance it without the government crawling all over everything. Book. You remember those? A pile of paper joined together at the side. Paper? Well, it’s flat and usually white, about the same size as the average screen but you generally point it upwards rather than sideways, and it’s very user friendly but for the time being rather hard to update … oh never mind …
Anyway the point is, unlike the usual drivel perpetrated by businessmen who fancy themselves as political stirrers without troubling to learn the trade, Don’s book is actually quite good. I haven’t read it properly, despite Don’s telephone nagging, but Patrick Crozier over at UK Transport has, and I commend his review to your attention, and the book itself.
Patrick Crozier has given two of my last-Friday-of-the-month talks, which are a regular fixture of the London Libertarian scene: last year about the general background and history of the British railway system and why the privatisation of it went so wrong (subsequently published as Libertarian Alliance Economic Notes No. 91), and, this February, on the political foreground of it – very fraught just now and likely to remain so. During these talks Patrick mentioned that in Japan there exists an interesting exception to the general rule these days that all railways are a mess and getting worse: a superbly efficient, profitable national railway network. Write it up, Patrick, everyone said. Well, now he has, not at huge length but very usefully, over at his recently launched UK Transport blog.
A point Patrick is fond of making about railway systems is that they aren’t so much a matter of seizing upon the very latest whizz-bang technology, as of simply using relatively mundane kit and making all of it work properly, all at once, all the time. I got a sharp email ticking-off (which I hope in due course to respond to more directly) from Neel Krishnaswami for being “fuzzily mystical” about “Asian values” in my earlier Japan related posting of March 06 2002. But, might not the Japanese railway system be an example of the Japanese playing from their stereotypical strength – consensual cooperation, and from their equally stereotypical “weakness” – unwillingness to fly off at an anti-consensual innovatory tangent? Patrick’s point being that this weakness may also be a strength when it comes to running a good railway.
Patrick Crozier has a good article On Corporate Manslaughter. He notes that the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) will be prosecuting Railtrack (the company which ‘owns’ the actual railroad infrastructure in Britain, recently in effect re-nationalised by the State). Thus one part of the state is trying to make another part of the state pay fines to yet another part of the state.
Patrick makes several excellent points and avoids the usual stale perspectives on these sort of issues.
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We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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