The wrong track

Unlike the jubilant Polly Toynbee, we are not convinced that David Cameron’s recent pronouncements on big business and the redistribution of wealth quite amount to a repudiation of capitalism, nor even, as she puts it, that the Conservative leader has ‘put a stake through Mrs Thatcher’s legacy’. Mr Cameron has yet to announce any firm policy at all, and it is a fair bet that when he does so it will not involve nationalisation of the means of production nor lead to droves of big businessmen being led off to jail on charges of ‘corporate irresponsibility’.

But when the time does come to prepare the next Conservative manifesto there is one big business which will need to be tackled, involving an admission of an earlier misjudgment by the Tories. It did not require this week’s average fare increases of 4.5 per cent to reaffirm the impression that rail privatisation has been far from the success of the earlier privatisations. It has not been a complete disaster: in the early years, services increased and old stations were reopened as rail companies began to respond to consumer demand. Thanks to the introduction of private capital many of the trains are newer and a few of the stations less shabby. But for a good many travellers the experience of privatisation has been one of inconvenience, discomfort and steeply rising prices. It isn’t just that the fares have increased well above inflation and out of all proportion to the quality of the service — a standard open return from London to Manchester now costs £202. Bizarrely, supporting the railway is costing taxpayers £4.1 billion a year — three times as big a public subsidy as British Rail received during its last full year of running train services.