[Ramrod]

Rail nationalisation: Jeremy Corbyn’s stupid flagship policy

Aren’t the railways in England, Scotland and Wales already owned by the state in the form of Network Rail? I know Network Rail lets franchises to private providers, such as FirstGroup and Virgin Group, but that doesn’t mean these private companies own the railways — the clue is in the word ‘let’. So how exactly will Corbyn ‘bring back into public ownership’ something that’s already owned by the public?
What he’ll do is wait for the existing leases to run their course and then, when the franchises come up for renewal, not rent them to private providers. Instead, they’ll be operated by a new, government provider — Corbyn Rail. Couple of problems with this.

First of all, only five of Great Britain’s 25 railway franchises are coming up for renewal between 2020 and 2025. If Corbyn is proposing to make the renationalisation of the railways the centrepiece of his first-term legislative programme, it’ll be a bit of a damp squib. By my estimation, he’d have to remain in power until 2036 in order to see this policy through.
You might think that none of this matters. After all, the chances of Corbyn becoming our next prime minister are fairly slim. But his abandonment of the cross-party consensus in this area will inevitably create a climate of uncertainty, deterring private companies from bidding for the franchises and discouraging the present operators from investing in the network. He’s also indicated that Labour would attempt to ‘renationalise’ academies and free schools, which will create similar levels of anxiety in the education sector.

If Corbyn continues in this vein, his leadership victory won’t just be a disaster for the Labour party. It will be a disaster for the whole country.