“WHAT a way to run a railroad” — making a mad mess of what should by nature be an orderly system has been a metaphor for screwing stuff up since at least the 1930s.

The phrase probably began with an advertisement for Admiral Cigarettes, which used the slogan while showing a signalman in his cabin so contented with his smoking that he ignored two trains running towards each other on a single track below.

But what we are doing with the railways now isn’t a metaphor for idiot contentment. It is idiocy. Let’s start with some symptoms.

Damian Green is Tory MP for Ashford and was Theresa May’s “First Secretary of State” — effectively deputy prime minister — in 2017. He had to give up his ministerial role after a journalist accused him of sexual harassment. The alleged misbehaviour was arguably less shocking than many Commons cases.

However, the Daily Mail subsequently printed text messages between Green and the journalist which put Green in a better light. But the text messages were crudely edited, making it seem someone in Green’s camp was trying to discredit a whistleblower with clumsy forgeries.

Green’s ministerial career rightly stalled. But big corporations always have room for shop-soiled politicians. This January Green became a part time “consultant” to private rail firm Abellio, the Dutch company running ScotRail, West Midlands Trains, East Midlands Railway, MerseyRail and Greater Anglia.

Green now supplements his MP’s salary with £40,000 per year from Abellio.The company believes in buying influential people more than it believes in properly paying the folk who make their trains run. 

In Scotland, RMT union members are in an industrial dispute with Abellio on their Scotrail franchise, in a series of strikes over underpayment of ticket collectors and guards.

Abellio has probably hired Green to help them with supposed Tory railway “reforms.” 

In May Transport Secretary Grant Shapps published a railways review, first commissioned in 2018 and led by Royal Mail chairman Keith Williams.

The Williams-Shapps review admits the 1992 Tory privatisation of the railways was a failure. Their review said rail privatisation “has never become publicly accepted, because its failings have remained all too obvious.

“Breaking British Rail into dozens of pieces was meant to foster competition between them and, together with the involvement of the private sector, was supposed to bring greater efficiency and innovation.

“Little of this has happened. Instead, the fragmentation of the network has made it more confusing for passengers, and more difficult and expensive to perform the essentially collaborative task of running trains on time.”

Bizarrely, despite this admission, Shapps plans to stick with this privatisation and fragmentation.

Currently, private firms like Abellio, Arriva or FirstGroup run the trains, but the track is operated by publicly owned National Rail. Shapps’s plan leaves this basic structure in place but renames National Rail “Great British Railways.”

This renaming sounds like a sort of patriotic nationalisation but isn’t. Great British Railways will have some more control of timetables and fares, but trains will still be run by Abellio et al. 

We will still have private companies profiting from the trains, without even the pretence of “competition” or “innovation.”

Instead there will be a version of the emergency system imposed when Covid-19 took away all the passengers. The government will simply pay private companies extra money on top of operation costs as “management fees." Rail operators will get their profit from these fees.

Abellio is already lobbying to increase these payments, which were set at 1.5 per cent on top of costs during Covid-19. 

The firm’s UK Managing Director Dominic Booth has pressed MPs to increase this fee to “attract contractors.” Booth said “There will have to be a decent incentive regime” for firms like Abellio to run the railways, suggesting “5 or 6 per cent” management fees. It is very likely Booth has now hired Damian Green as an ally in his fight for these bigger “incentives.”

As well as being a former minister, Damian Green is influential as chairman of the Tory “moderate” group One Nation Conservatism.

His new job means he is actually working for another nation, as Abellio is owned by the Dutch state. Like most UK rail operators, Abellio is the profit-seeking arm of a European state-owned rail operator. 

The fact Shapps is branding his plan “Great British Railways,” to make it sound like a re- nationalisation, shows the government fears its continued privatisation is unpopular and  wants to pretend it is doing the opposite. This shows an opportunity for Labour to press hard for real change.

Unfortunately, Labour’s right wing are getting into the party’s driver’s cabin, and they are compromised on the issue.

In 1995 Tony Blair won an internal battle to redraw the pro-nationalisation Clause 4, one of the founding statements of the Labour party. This was seen as a big contribution to getting Labour elected in 1997. 

Many pundits still use the phrase “Clause 4 moment,” suggesting any symbolic attack on socialist values by Labour leaders has almost magical vote-winning properties.

However, while throwing away political principles can sometimes get short-term political gain, it causes longer term political pain. Blair’s “Clause 4 moment” was very largely aimed at ending Labour’s plan to renationalise rail. That might have got him some support in the right-wing press, but was a policy mistake. How did not renationalising British Rail go?

Railtrack, the privatised track operator, failed in 2002. A series of rail crashes, including the 2000 Hatfield crash, showed privatised Railtrack and their corporate subcontractors were not maintaining the tracks properly, so passengers and staff were killed.

After the lethal crashes, Railtrack tried to get control by imposing emergency speed limits, but these made the system unworkable. Passengers died, then the system started grinding to a halt.

Railtrack couldn’t make a profit and be safe, so went bankrupt. Blair made opposing rail nationalisation central to his supposedly successful “Clause 4 moment” but was forced by lethal accidents to renationalise the track. 

Blair tried to disguise the renationalisation, setting up Network Rail in a confusing way to disguise the fact it was a public body. 

The Tories know they are on weak ground, because rail renationalisation would be good and popular. The Labour right are in a weak position to press them on this because they believe their shift away from nationalisation has some kind of totemic effect.