"History repeats itself, first time as tragedy, second time as farce." With a slight bastardisation, this is a frequently used, if not also famous, quote from Karl Marx in his 1852 essay entitled, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.

Sticking with the French connection, and with the aid of crystal ball, the travails of ScotRail could easily have been the kind of thing Marx had in mind some 170 years and 172 years later.

Two years ago on April 1, ScotRail was returned to public ownership after 25 years of privatisation. The following month, the new ScotRail experienced something of a baptism of fire in the form of widespread industrial action when members of the Aslef drivers’ union refused to work overtime in a dispute over their pay rise. This led to widespread cancelations of services because of the shortage of drivers.

This was the tragedy of a new but much-needed experiment in public ownership being laid low by the inability of the management to train enough new drivers.

But the new ScotRail had a get-out clause. This was that it had only just been in operation for a short while and so was operating with the legacy of the previous private company.

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Indeed, and again showing a French connection, it argued it was subject to force majeure, namely, an uncontrollable event like war or extreme weather that is not its fault and makes it difficult or impossible for it to carry out its normal operations. This force majeure took the form of the pandemic public health regulations preventing ScotRail from being able to train an estimated 130 drivers.

But now we have the farce, maybe even a French farce if the aforementioned tragedy was a Greek one.

Two years on from then, ScotRail still does not have enough drivers and has now, again, begun widely cutting back on the number of services it runs because drivers are again refusing to work voluntary overtime to voice their dissatisfaction over the poor pay rise they have been offered.

As new drivers take part in a training programme which lasts between 18 and 24 months, ScotRail has no get-out clause this time, however.

For a weary travelling public hoping returning ScotRail to public ownership would bring light at the end of the tunnel, it must seem that an April’s Fool has been played on it.

But the bigger picture is that, along with other well-known calamities such as Ferguson Marine and Caledonian MacBrayne, the SNP Scottish Government is giving public ownership a very bad name. And, to boot, it is doing so at precisely a time when privatisation - of the likes of Thames Water - has been shown to be a cul-de-sac for citizens and consumers (but not capitalists). This is nothing short of catastrophic.

The SNP claims to be a left-of-centre, social democratic party, and one of the quintessential characteristics of social democracy is public ownership. This is because public ownership is the main way in which the social democratic state can intervene in the processes and outcomes of the market in order to ameliorate the market’s effects of inequality.

The view of the public in Scotland has increasingly become the Scottish Government cannot build ships on time and to cost (Ferguson Marine); it has allowed a ferry service to be run aground with an ageing and decrepit fleet (Caledonian MacBrayne); it has permitted management to lavish luxurious training trips upon itself (the Water Industry Commission for Scotland (WICS); and it has tolerated executives giving themselves huge pay rises while sacking staff (Glasgow City College).

To say that the Scottish Government has lost its reputation with citizens for competent government would then be something of an understatement. Certainly, that was one of the reasons cited by commentators as to why the SNP lost so many votes and seats in the recent general election. Moreover, for a political party that has run itself in a managerialist manner - some would say even Stalinesque style - this is quite mindboggling. So, how can all this be explained? Well, the first part to explaining this is because the SNP’s version of public ownership is the new neo-liberal form of state commercialism: state companies and not core parts of the Scottish state itself. In the case of ScotRail, it is operating on pretty much the same principles as before when it existed in the private sector and when Abellio had the franchise.

Let’s also recall that with ScotRail, the move to becoming a state company was a reluctant one. The SNP Scottish Government issued Abellio with umpteen improvement notices but that made no difference. It then was forced to establish a state-owned "operator of last resort", Scottish Rail Holdings, in order to take over and provide ScotRail services.

Ferguson Marine has been another public ownership failureFerguson Marine has been another public ownership failure (Image: Newsquest)

Whereupon, the self-same SNP Scottish Government dismissed the opportunity to implement its own "Fair Work" policy, based upon five principles including "effective voice", "security" and "respect" for workers. So, it could have created worker directors, and with them secured a far more stable set of industrial relations for ScotRail.

But more fundamentally, the second part to explaining this - the resolution to the riddle - comes from understanding the nature of the SNP. Its claim to be social democratic is somewhat hollow because it still consciously chooses to use private sector logic and capability to deliver public services. And that means giving management far more leeway than it should.

But it goes deeper that because the SNP wants a smart and successful form of Scottish capitalism to be able to generate the taxes to pay for its social welfare policies - and so will brook no opposition to anything that stops this Scottish capitalism being given the best chance to be profitable.

All this goes to show that in and of itself public ownership is a necessary but not sufficient condition to lead to good and equitable outcomes. Public ownership must be of a genuine social democratic bent where the perspective is not to save private ownership from itself by bailing it out or by trying to run it more profitably than the private sector could.

Gregor Gall is a visiting professor of industrial relations at the University of Leeds and author of the Mick Lynch: The making of a working-class hero (Manchester University Press, 2024).