The Guardian view on Great British Railways: renationalisation can put passengers back in the driving seat
Last month, this journey back to the future began as the first renationalised South Western Railway (SWR) service departed Woking for London Waterloo, complete with union jack branding and the logo 'Great British Railways: coming soon'. The remaining nine private franchises will be back in public ownership by 2027, by which time a new GBR headquarters will be up and running in Derby. The transport secretary, Heidi Alexander, hailed the moment as a new dawn. There can be little doubt that a reset is badly needed. Fragmentation, in the name of competition, was the original sin of the destructive and ideological privatisation of the rail network in the 1990s. The wrongheaded decision to separate the management of track and trains led to confused accountability and buck-passing between train operators and Network Rail.
Accompanying marketisation, and the restless search for profit, inaugurated an era in which a baffling profusion of ticket types did little to mitigate the cost of travelling on the most expensive trains in Europe. Poor performance by franchises such as Avanti West Coast and TransPennine Express (taken back into public ownership in 2023) undermined public confidence in an industry crucial to Britain's green transition. A period of disastrous industrial relations, and reduced passenger numbers since the pandemic, have compounded a sense of crisis.
It would be foolish to hope for an instant turnaround. The future shape and finances of rail travel are still unclear, following the post-Covid collapse in lucrative commuter and business travel. But having been constituted explicitly as a publicly run 'guiding mind' for the whole network, carrying responsibility for both track and trains, GBR will have the power to rationalise its operations and place the interests of passengers first. A simpler, more joined-up ticketing system should be a priority.
Somewhat bathetically, the optics of last month's SWR launch were compromised by Sunday engineering works and the need for a rail replacement bus from Surbiton to London Waterloo. Some things never change. But though free-market dogmatists will have relished that hitch to proceedings, a large majority of the population strongly welcome the prospective return of a vital public good to public hands. Much of their support, however, is undoubtedly linked to a hope that GBR will do something to address the often prohibitive cost of travelling by rail in Britain. On the subject of cheaper tickets, Ms Alexander has been noticeably reticent, pointing to current subsidies of £2bn a year.
Labour should think bigger. In the 1960s, Ms Alexander's predecessor in the Department for Transport, Barbara Castle, pioneered the idea of a subsidised 'social railway' in the wake of the deeply unpopular Beeching cuts. After a disruptive and demoralising period, a similar level of imagination is needed today for an industry that delivers crucial economic, environmental and societal benefits.
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Washington knows the Palestinian Authority pays the families of suicide bombers stipends, an accusation it has levelled for years — so why issue sanctions, including visa bans, now? It is clearly to undermine the new international push for a two-state solution, including the Arab-led plan for Gaza's reconstruction, with policing undertaken by Egyptian-trained Palestinian Authority police. Less clear is if this indicates that President Trump will never allow a Palestinian state, or that he will, but wants to ensure only he can bring it about (and thus win a Nobel peace prize). Within two days, Trump went from 'having no view' on world leaders saying they would recognise Palestine to castigating Canada's prime minister, Mark Carney, for doing the same thing. A post on his Truth Social platform said: 'That will make it very hard for us to make a trade deal with them. Oh Canada!!!' Some of the pre-existing problems were contained in the New York declaration. It reiterated that the 5.9 million Palestinian refugees have the 'right of return' to the places in Israel they left in 1948. The UN categorises as refugees the descendants of Palestinians who fled. Israel asks why only Palestinians have this UN status and says there is no way it would ever allow almost six million Palestinians to enter its borders. We are back where we began — definitions. The most used criteria for statehood are in the 1933 Montevideo convention: a permanent population, a defined territory, an effective government, the capacity for external relations. Opposing sides argue about whether Palestinian refugees should be included in the definition of a permanent population, and what are the defined borders. Some will say the Palestinian Authority can be an effective government and others that it is a corrupt fossil with little authority over the West Bank, never mind Gaza, which was/is run by Hamas. 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