Is Boris finally ditching Thatcherism with the invention of Great British Rail?

From a distance, GBR does sound like a reassuring blast from the nationalised past, albeit with the inevitable and cringeworthy Great British Name.

But don’t be fooled.

Look past the cheery promises of British Rail minus the sandwiches.

Ignore the partial adoption of that solid and familiar BR logo.

Don’t be distracted by speculation that upmarket trainspotter Michael Portillo will be appointed Chair or suckered by claims that Boris has cleverly stolen Corbyn’s clothing.

This is not a return to public ownership – just a clever marketing ploy. And much of the UK press has fallen for it, hook, line and sinker.

GBR is a new public sector body that will take over timetabling to end the constant unco-ordinated changes that make the lives of English commuters miserable. It will set prices (as the Government used to do) and manage rail infrastructure (as Network Rail used to do).

The actual rolling stock will still be owned by Rolling Stock Companies (ROSCOs), which lease kit to train operators with franchises. An unhealthy 87 per cent of Britain’s rolling stock is owned by just three ROSCOs and that probably won’t change. But each franchise will now be issued by GBR rather than the Department of Transport and each successful private operator will now be paid a flat management fee while GBR (the taxpayer) bears all the risk.

Nationalisation?

Not on your nelly.

Indeed, announcing the change, English Transport Secretary Grant Shapps insisted that GBR will "unleash the competitive, innovative and expert abilities of the private sector, and ensure passengers come first".

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Good luck squaring that unhappy circle. English train services are currently the most expensive and least punctual in Europe so if a relatively unchanged system can transform things, it’ll be a minor miracle. Maybe new red-white-and-blue public branding will somehow raise morale.

But if GBR isn’t likely to solve Britain’s rail problems, why bother?

It partly formalises the emergency support arrangements put in place when lockdown brought most rail travel to a grinding halt and partly distracts from the ongoing nightmare of rail travel south of the Border, complete with breakdowns, overcrowding, delays and price rises.

The public ownership pressure group "We Own It" says rail passengers currently pay five times more for tickets than our European neighbours (as a proportion of salaries), even though British Government subsidies to the rail sector have almost doubled since the 1993 privatisation.

There’s another unfortunate contrast – private rail companies shelled out more than £1.2 billion in dividends to shareholders over the last five years, during which time 50 per cent of trains in the north of England arrived late.

Meanwhile the East Coast rail service has done pretty well. Taken into public ownership for five years, it generated £1 billion for the public purse, only to be re-privatised in 2014 and then re-nationalised in 2018. The Northern Rail franchise also blossomed after it was taken back from the German-based Arriva Rail.

But despite the fairly healthy track record of public ownership and the repeated, loss-making, confidence-sapping experience with private rail operators, Boris Johnson is ploughing on – giving Thatcher's disastrous rail privatisation policy, a Great British Facelift for this new century.

It’s not just rail.

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Proposed changes to the NHS in England reveal the steady capture of public services by a private sector that will now shoulder less debt thanks to the £13.4bn of NHS Trust loans that were craftily written off on the first day of lockdown in 2020.

It did look as if change was in the air when Matt Hancock announced his intention to scrap the part of the 2012 Health and Social Care Act which requires compulsive competitive tendering for services – a requirement that’s allowed Richard Branson’s Virgin Care, for example, to win £2bn worth of health contracts in five years.

He then revealed that local clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) are to go, but that doesn’t mean NHS England is inching back towards a normal, publicly owned health service like Scotland’s. No, in England contracts will stay – but duplication and bureaucracy will go by conducting procurement centrally, without any semblance of democratic local control. Given the fact Covid contracts were disproportionally won by chums of Boris Johnson last year, health activists now fear that "local" contracts will be awarded in Whitehall without any tendering process at all.

It’s the same story with social care.

While the world waits for the Prime Minister’s Big Care Plan, local integrated care systems are being established where private companies will be invited to sit on governing boards and become part of the decision-making process, even though they are also bidding for contracts.

Whether it’s prisons, rail, bus, energy or the Royal Mail – public services in England are slowly being consumed by the private sector.

And Boris Johnson’s "reforms" are not about abandoning Thatcher's disastrous privatisations but stealthily rehabilitating them for a new century.

Stealthily – because public ownership is actually very popular.

Recent polls suggest the public sector should mostly run schools (82%, 2020); public transport (73%); Royal Mail (69%) and utilities like water (63%).

Evidently English voters (the bulk of those surveyed) back public ownership but will back a party hellbent on extending the writ of the market as long as that fact does not dominate their manifesto.

So repurposing, renaming, remodelling and "reforming" are the name of the game – superficial change that helps privatisation survive.

Meanwhile, the Scottish Government continues its journey in the opposite direction, with a publicly-owned NHS, education system and water supply and plans to take ScotRail back into public ownership next year.

Scotland and England are obviously different countries by geography and by political outlook. The latest Flavible poll offers a striking physical manifestation of that difference, with a projected map of England solid blue beyond the cities and Scotland SNP yellow from Shetland to the Borders at the next Westminster election.

Which prompts two questions.

How long will privatising Boris Johnson, turn a blind eye to nationalising Nicola Sturgeon?

And what happens once the Great British Privatisation Agenda finally gets rolled out here?

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