How John Prescott and I were proved right about railway privatisation

John Prescott made life difficult for John Major’s Conservatives as they privatised the railways, and the passage of time has shown that he was right

The death of John Prescott revived memories of a very enjoyable period in my own political life when we worked closely together in an effort to frustrate rail privatisation. We failed but we were right.

In the cycle of politics, it is fitting that after 30 years, putting the railways together again is back on the agenda, driven by necessity far more than ideology. Privatising the railways was always a bad idea but fragmenting them was even worse.

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Back in the 1990s, there was a sustained campaign to point out why this was folly. The problems with British Rail had been mainly due to lack of investment, not to the absence of competition within a natural monopoly. There is, after all, only one set of tracks.

Clever and creative

Prescott was a great guy to work with. There was no personal vanity and he held the factionalism that went on around him in contempt. He was in politics to deliver a fairer society, just as he had fought for his fellow seafarers as a trade unionist.

“When I die,” he once predicted, “after 50 years in politics, all they will show on the news is 60 seconds of me thumping a fellow in Wales”. That has proved to be over-pessimistic though, to be fair, his spontaneous response to an egg-thrower during the 2001 election campaign was part of what made Prescott different.

Far from being an ‘old Labour’ token, giving cover to Tony Blair’s modernising leadership, Prescott was a clever and creative politician in his own right. He identified with the aspirational working class and knew that Labour without power was no use to them or anyone else. His thinking was always geared towards outcomes that made a practical difference.

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Former Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, who has died at the age of 86, worked hard to make progress on climate change (Picture: Ian Forsyth)Former Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, who has died at the age of 86, worked hard to make progress on climate change (Picture: Ian Forsyth)
Former Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, who has died at the age of 86, worked hard to make progress on climate change (Picture: Ian Forsyth) | Getty Images

Hard work, lasting results

In the wake of his death, one of the warmest tributes came from Al Gore, the former US vice-president who worked with him on driving through the Kyoto Protocol which became a major landmark in the movement to counter climate change, by setting legal obligations.

“I’ve never worked with anyone in politics – on my side of the pond or his – quite like John Prescott,” said Gore. “He possessed an inherent ability to connect with people about the issues that mattered to them – a talent that others spend years studying and cultivating, but that was second nature to him."

And, Gore added, Prescott “worked like hell” to deliver Kyoto. Hard work to deliver lasting results. These are the characteristics and achievements for which Prescott deserves to be remembered and which should remind his successors of why they are in politics.

Great British Railways

Over intervening decades, the two causes – railways and net zero – have merged. It is more important than ever to have a system that is attractive, accessible and affordable to use. Most European countries manage to deliver that through state-run enterprises and there is no inherent reason why it should not have happened here too. There is a lot of track to be made up.

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In 1992, when rail privatisation came on the agenda, Prescott enlisted me to fight the cause and do as much damage as possible to John Major’s government in the process. It was good politics and great fun. Rail privatisation did as much as any issue to cost the Tories power five years later.

Coincidentally this week, I had been taking the same trip down memory lane with some old railway hands who are now eagerly awaiting the more difficult challenge of putting most of it back together again as Great British Railways, as promised in Labour’s manifesto.

Illusion of competition

There are three decades of complexity to be undone. The easy bit will be bringing the franchises still held by private operators into Great British Railways when they expire “without the taxpayer having to pay a penny in compensation to outgoing private operators”.

This in itself should lead to improvements in coordination of a national rail network, without the confusion caused by different operators, separate ticketing and all the other duplications, disputes and costs which arise through the illusion of competition.

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Privatising the railways did not even have the benefit at the time of boosting Tory government coffers, like the sale of the utilities. On the contrary, it meant a steadily increasing state subsidy, now running at £20 billion a year – which still does not prevent passengers having to pay through the nose.

A recipe for disaster

Over these years, much of the public money has leeched out of the railways into shareholders’ dividends, yet the substantial renationalisation which has already happened has not required an ideological motivation. Instead, the great privateers of the 1990s either went bust or walked away. They had to be taken over.

In 2002, Railtrack – which had been handed the infrastructure – was first to go. Not only had the promised private investment failed to materialise but safety implications of a fragmented railway became all too apparent, culminating in the Hatfield crash. That cost Railtrack a fortune in compensation and they soon had to be rescued from bankruptcy.

Since then, the train operating companies have gone from licences to print money for the likes of Stagecoach and Virgin to liabilities they wanted out of. As well as ScotRail and the Welsh railway, the East Coast main line, Transpennine, Northern, Southeastern and Caledonian Sleeper are all back in public hands.

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The biggest beneficiaries of rail privatisation have been the lawyers and accountants who feed off innumerable disputes which arise every time a train runs late or a target is missed. Rail fragmentation was a recipe for disaster – which is presumably why nobody else has done it.

It won’t all be reversed overnight but 30 years on, I would love to have heard one last tub-thumping Prescott speech to remind the country that all of this was pointed out at the time.

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