It was the transport secretary’s big day, so let’s forget about ideology – and don’t ask about ticket prices
Methinks he doth protest too much. “This is not renationalisation,” the transport secretary, Grant Shapps, had said in his statement to the Commons on the overhaul of the rail network. Yet you couldn’t help thinking that many of the proposals being put forward were all but that in name. Something to which the Tories would have raised countless objections had they been put forward by the Labour party. Instead it was yet another Conservative minister looking to take the credit for sorting out the mess caused by a previous Tory government. We’re getting a lot of that these days.
Shapps started with something on which anyone who used trains in the 1970s and 80s could agree. That British Rail had been a bit crap. Trains were filthy, seldom ran on time, ran a sketchy service, and the sandwiches were inedible. Not that the catering was a great deal better on Virgin trains, as far as I can remember. But the minister was also forced to admit that while the part-privatisation of the rail industry under John Major’s administration in 1993 had reversed some of the decline, the record over the past 15 years or so had hardly been a glowing success.
