Aw that Public ownership matters

THIS week saw the fourth anniversary of lockdown. Rightly, these moments will take people back to the countless thousands who lost their lives while one government partied and another took stock of the constitutional possibilities. 

They should also bring to mind the millions of workers providing essential services even during its worst phases, often sent into work in the hospital, the supermarket or out emptying our bins pitifully ill-equipped by employers — public and private — chronically ill-prepared for the scenario. 

There were moments of desperately needed light relief though, little moments to fend off the sense of doom that seemed to envelop the country and what felt like most of the world. 

Footage of deer wandering freely about some our major cities gave new voice to that old cliche “nature is healing.” For me, like thousands of other people fond of a whirl, getting out on my bike was a welcome escape from what felt like an ever-shrinking home and world. After decades of having to seek out the quietest roads, suddenly they were all deserted.  

Alas, it did not last. Soon there would be a steady stream of empty buses, but not before the day of the delivery driver. The steady drift to online shopping over the years accelerated during lockdown as people ordered food as well as myriad tat to while away their time trapped inside. 

I watched van after van come into our street, I once counted a dozen in a morning — I was that bored — and wondered about all those emissions. As lockdown ended, that habit had taken hold, though, and there will be few streets in our land which don’t see an endless procession of white vans to add to the usual red of the Royal Mail. 

Since Lord Mandelson delivered the liberalisation of the postal market, we have gone from having the cheapest, fastest mail services in Europe — admittedly with some private sector in larger parcels — to rocketing prices and the very future of the one-price-goes-anywhere service now in the balance. 

The inevitable side-effect of liberalisation was the privatisation of the Royal Mail — one of the few Liberal Democrat polices actually delivered in their coalition with the Tories. 

Through the miracle of the market, we now have umpteen vans delivering what one used to, with many of those vans being driven by people on appalling contracts of employment — if indeed they have contracts at all — and increasing attacks on the terms of workers in the Royal Mail. 

It was all quite predictable. When buses where deregulated and privatised in the late ’80s, people like Brian Souter rapidly accumulated extreme wealth as services we once owned were taken over by private enterprise for a song. 

Services shrank, and workers’ terms and conditions have suffered in the name of that profit motive. A recent recruitment campaign for a major operator in Glasgow even boasted in a mailshot that its drivers could earn £15 an hour — it doesn’t seem much to me for taking responsibility for the safety of hundreds of passengers every day. 

And then there is the game of cat and mouse in subsidies. The market miracle after all isn’t so miraculous that it can survive without state handouts. 

Not content with taking on municipal depots for a song, transport authorities like Strathclyde Partnership Transport (SPT) found themselves paying these profit-making companies to deliver socially necessary routes, while allowing them to keep surpluses elsewhere. 

This process tees-up what has become game of cat and mouse between transport authorities and bus operators, as they periodically announce the withdrawal of a service, safe in the knowledge that there will be such an outcry from local people and politicians that the authority will have to cough up the cash to make the route “viable.”

It’s a nonsense perpetrated in plain sight, but it’s far from the only one. 

Here in Scotland, I have witnessed this rampant profiteering take an even stranger turn. 

Nearly two decades ago, the Labour-Liberal coalition running the then Scottish executive adopted a policy of free bus travel for the over-60s, the SNP-Green Scottish government has recently extended this free travel to the under-22s and there is much talk across the parties of extending it further still. 

It has disproportionately benefited those on the lowest incomes and encourages the use of mass transit with all the environmental gains that could bring. It’s an extremely popular policy, and woe betide the politician — even in these straitened times — that might pluck up the courage to row back on it. 

It’s not just popular with passengers though, it’s also a nice little earner for the private sector.  

A number of years ago, I was handed a scrapbook of tickets by a Govan pensioner. 

“What do you notice about that, son?” 

I’ll confess, all I could think about was that this was very odd behaviour, until she pointed to a detail on the tickets I had missed. On enough occasions to fill a scrapbook, she had been given tickets to the end of the route, when she barely travelled half of it, all paid for by the Scottish government. 

That single incident — though I believe it was far from unique — neatly sums up the ludicrous nature of public transport that isn’t public, and what can be described as at best utter political ineptitude. 

Ownership matters. State largesse delivered through a private filter will always leave the millionaires with the cream. 

This week, SPT faced threats of legal action from McGill’s buses merely for the consideration of introducing a franchising model into the bus services it is supposed to regulate. 

Its chief executive, Ralph Roberts, warned that the modest step towards a public transport system was a “threat of theft of a private business” and that “franchising is effectively confiscation.”

If only. 

The brass neck of such a statement is remarkable. To the eternal shame of every politician of every party who has ducked the issue for decades with mealy mouthed partnerships that offer even more cash to bus companies just to do their jobs, 45 per cent — £314 million — of the income of bus companies in Scotland comes from public subsidy. 

This situation was impossible to justify at the best of times, but even as we prepare to transition away from fossil fuels our political leadership still shies away from even demanding a stake, much less full ownership. 

When the baby-steps forward that are being taken across the country are celebrated by our political classes as taking back “public control,” they delude themselves and they short change the public. 

Genuine public control of essential services, from health and social care to buses is an illusion without ownership, and any woolly talk of progressing to public ownership in a piecemeal way, one day, maybe, should not be trusted. 

The private sector has a foothold, and every second of the day the state funds these subsidy junkies handsomely to fight with all their might to keep it.  

The next time you’re at a bus stop for ages, waiting on the inevitable two companies’ buses come along at once, imagine what could be possible. 

Dream of a reawakening of democracy, where politicians throw off their pretensions to management and confront disaster capitalism, not with bailouts and a shrug of the shoulders, but with a fight… Then make it happen.