[TRAIN ON TRACKS]

People are feeling romantic about nationalisation

because they don't remember how awful it was.

The railway is a natural monopoly.

You don't get to choose which train you travel on,

which company you choose.

It doesn't make sense to introduce a market

into the railway.

There are two big problems with the railways at the moment,

the fares are too high, and they've

been going up relentlessly.

And the second problem I can put in two words.

Southern Rail.

If you look at some of the trains they've invested in,

they're pretty unpleasant.

No tables.

Nowhere to put your drinks down.

It looks like the sort of place they

want to hose down after the passengers have been in there.

I think privatisation has brought many advances.

Certainly one of the advances brought

is an enormous increase in the number of people using trains.

Jeremy Corbyn is a great trainspotter.

So he and I see completely eye to eye on the railways.

And I'd love to be his thin controller.

[LAUGHTER]

We didn't feel it appropriate to say

that the Chancellor and the Transport Secretary

were locked in mortal combat.

But that is more or less what it was.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Britain is the birthplace of the modern railway.

But the network is now at the centre of a political battle.

25 years ago every train, every piece of track,

and every station in the UK was sold off to private companies.

Now, with calls for re-nationalisation growing

louder, we're here to ask, why did we privatise the railways?

And was it worth it?

One man who was there in the engine

room of the great Conservative sell off,

stoking the fires of privatisation,

is now better known as a connoisseur of the railways.

Trains were old.

They were very often dirty.

And the most famous symbol was the curly British Rail

sandwich, because the standard of catering was so poor.

So it was universally acknowledged

that the nationalised industries were

giving an extremely poor standard of service,

because they had no accountability to the customer.

The private railway companies were taken into public

ownership in 1948, when Clement Attlee's Labour government

decided to nationalise swathes of British industry.

By the time John Major became prime minister in 1990,

the service was seen as a neglected part of the transport

system.

Ministers thought British Rail's management was asleep

at the wheel, and looked at ways to bring in the private sector.

So why did the rail privatisation

come quite so late?

I think it's partly because it was complex.

And partly because I don't think Margaret Thatcher particularly

wanted to do it.

I mean, it's odd, because privatisation

is much associated with Margaret Thatcher, and rightly so.

Although she moved into it a little reluctantly.

She was quite slow to do the first privatisations.

And railways and the post office, for example,

were way down her list.

So it only got going in the Major years.

And even then, it took a very long time.

When I was first working on privatisation, the plans we had

were not at all the plans that turned out to be.

Quite honestly, the principal motivation

was that we had an industry that we thought

was in terminal decline.

And something, almost anything, had to be done about it.

And this is really what I would ask you to judge privatisation

against.

I know there have been many other changes.

But not many people gave railways

a hope, even of survival in the late 1980s.

The railways more than survived.

But the journey has not been smooth.

Awarding contracts at the lowest possible cost

has depressed the quality of train services.

The companies complain of squeezed profit margins.

But passengers still seem to blame the operators,

as the government piles more of the costs onto the travelling

public.

As passenger fares have risen, so has public anger.

And the remedy that these angry commuters

seem to be reaching for is to take the whole system back

into public ownership.

One commuter decided he'd had enough.

David Boyle challenged Southern Rail's poor service

by organising a protest at Brighton Station

with his fellow passengers.

They were irate at the delays and cancellations resulting

from an ongoing dispute between the train operating

company and the trade unions.

They refused to show their tickets

and had a tea party instead.

Well, the reason I got so cross was during the strike,

when no one was taking responsibility for it,

was it felt like you were going into a restaurant.

They won't give you your meal properly.

They're late in delivering it.

And they still expect you to pay.

And what's more, they check your ticket.

They have the nerve to check your ticket.

So it seemed to me, what would Gandhi

do in those circumstances?

He would refuse to show his ticket.

It's a ripoff for both passengers and the public.

And it has failed.

That's why we need public ownership.

Cat Hobbs speaks for We Own It, a pressure group

campaigning for public services to be brought back

into government hands.

76% of us believe the railways should be in public ownership.

And that's across all age groups.

We know that people really believe the railways should

be publicly owned.

And we can achieve that very easily

by bringing rail franchises in house

as they come up for renewal.

When you see the ridiculous chaos in Southern Railways,

and the huge inconvenience to the travelling public,

going back several months, well, of course,

the public are entitled not just to be annoyed, but to be very,

very angry.

If I used Southern Railway, I'd be

livid at the nonsense that's gone on there.

Another angry protester?

Actually, this is Malcolm Rifkind, former transport

secretary, and one of the architects of Britain's

privatised railways.

I basically reversed what was perceived

to be a conservative policy of the previous 12 years,

and said, I am unashamedly part of a government

that is committed to an expansion of the rail network.

And I had John Major's full support in doing that.

When you were secretary of state for transport,

you were not in agreement with the Treasury

on how it should be done.

Yes.

Although I had no problem with the principle of privatisation,

where I did depart from the view of the Chancellor

of the Exchequer and of the Treasury

was as to the separation of responsibility

for the infrastructure, for the railway track,

from the operating of the railways that use that track.

To divorce from the person who's running the railway

the ability to manage the track as well

in the most economic and sensible way

was irrational, bad economics, and bad business sense.

Instead of pushing British Rail into the private sector

as a single company, it was broken

into three components, track, rolling stock,

and train operators.

The real competition on the railways

was not from other railways.

It was from whether people decided to use the rail,

or to use air or road in order to get

to where they wished to go.

And that meant that by the time of the 1992 general election,

when the manifesto was being drawn up,

we had not yet reached a position on this.

This set out in here is the sort of Britain

I am going to see, and lead this country to

in the next few months.

In 1992, a secret memo was circulated

among senior conservatives discussing

how to privatise the railways.

The preferred option was to approach privatisation

on the basis of line of route.

Why?

Because this was easy to explain,

and was appealing to local regional pride,

and a sense of identity.

The memo acknowledges that this method would not

be the most pro-competitive solution.

Opinion polls showed that privatising BR

was popular with the public.

It would be important to bring about privatisation

in a way that captured the political trick.

If it meant you were adopting a system that,

in all other respects, was an inferior one, then

that would be a very bad thing to do.

If you devise a policy which not only appears

to be the best way of running the country,

but happens in addition to be quite popular,

yes, we plead guilty as politicians

to being attracted to that as a way of resolving whatever

the problem might be.

But now it seems that the pendulum of public support has

swung completely in the other direction and favours

the Labour solution.

I think the public mood is there, absolutely there, saying

bring our railways back into public ownership.

Clearly, in your view, it would be a mistake

to follow the Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell prescription.

I think it would be one of the silliest, most foolish things

they could do.

Apart from anything else, it would cost

billions of public expenditure.

There would be massive disruption for a number

of years, until you got back.

And where would you be going back to?

You'd be going back to a state system

of running the railways, which during the period that

had operated in this country saw a constant decline in railway

usage and a constant increase in public dissatisfaction

right up till the 1990s when we privatised.

So that's what you call dumb.

There's no question that passenger numbers

have gone up since the railways were privatised.

The number of journeys has increased from 761 million

in 1995 to 1.7 billion in 2016.

But most of this is concentrated around London.

Not everyone thinks this is fair.

I'm Lilian Greenwood.

I'm the Labour MP for Nottingham South.

And I chair the Commons Transport Select Committee.

We're here on this train, speeding

north to your constituency in Nottingham.

And clearly, there's an enormous amount of investment

that has gone into the railway system.

I mean, you could almost say, the railways

have never had it so good.

There's a lot more public money going in now

than there was at the time when we

had British Rail as a nationalised rail industry.

I think that's one of the things that

perhaps is a concern about franchising on its own terms.

It was meant to lead to cheaper fares, a more

efficient railway, requiring less taxpayer subsidy.

And actually, those things haven't been delivered.

So how much money does the UK government

spend subsidising each of the train companies?

Well, it depends.

Between 2016 and 2017 all of them

received more funds than they contributed to the government,

with two notable exceptions, Virgin Trains East

Coast and South West Trains.

South West Trains lost its franchise.

And Virgin Trains East Coast has been flirting with collapse.

We ended up taking a system and throwing it

into the air with the infrastructure

pushed off into Railtrack a privatised infrastructure