I used to own a railway, you know.
As such organisations go, it wasn't bad. It was formed in 1948 and inherited a motley collection of old steam engines and rolling stock in an appalling state of disrepair after years of wartime drudgery, and an infrastructure that, apart from patching up the bomb damage, had received little or no maintenance in the last nine years. As "British Railways" it soldiered on, building new and rather fine steam engines and then some indifferent diesels, replacing much of the stock and managing to make a go of things even in the face of government-sponsored competition from road haulage.
After a while it re-invented itself as "British Rail", painted all the engines blue and closed a lot of minor lines. For this it is hated to this day by railway enthusiasts, but the fact is that there's still a hell of a lot of railway left in this country (I know, I just got my first Senior Rail card!), and though British Rail were quite unable to supply an edible sandwich, the trains did run, they mostly didn't crash, and they sometimes arrived on time.
And all this was mine - and yours, of course. It was a national industry, owned by the state for the benefit of the citizens of the state.
Then the Tory government gave it away. Without so much as a by-your-leave they gave away my railway so that their friends could all buy shares in it and make a huge profit. It wasn't a very bright thing to do, as almost no railway has made much of a profit for the last hundred years, but these were the days of Thatcherite enthusiasm when the idiots believed that everything and anything could be used to turn a fast buck. I only wish we'd grown out of it, but sadly we haven't.
The way it was done was pretty ludicrous, too. They formed one company, Railtrack, to own and manage the track itself. Then other companies could bid for the right to run trains on it, using engines and carriages hired from still more companies. This was to ensure that there were lots of companies so that the government and their friends could own lots of shares and make lots of money. The only ones who lost were the poor bloody passengers.
Well, now the wheel has come full circle. Railtrack was underfunded (as railways have always been in this country) and poorly run (which by-and-large they haven't been), and it got into massive trouble. In 2001 Tony Blair's government, in the person of that execrable little s**t Stephen Byers, decided to scrap it and put in its place another company called Network Rail. Trouble is, he didn't pay the Railtrack shareholders anything like its true worth - in 1998 shares had been valued at £17, but in 2002 he paid them only £2.50 and got the whole shooting match at a knock-down price of £500 million when it should have cost him £4 billion.
The shareholders were furious. Nor were they deterred by Byers' threats of vast legal costs, and but for the London bombings the big news this week would have been the court case where they are suing the government for "malfeasance" ("misuse of power"). It looks as if they might win, too.
So I feel quite pleased, really - hardly grumpy at all. It looks as if one nasty little politician is getting his arse kicked, the government is going to be revealed for the bunch of scheming cheats we've always known them to be … and the shareholders? Well, if you remember, they were the ones who pinched my railway in the first place, because they thought they could make a nice little profit. I don't remember them paying me any compensation, either, so the whole thing served them bloody well right.
From my point of view it's all turned out rather well, I think. Now, Mr.Blair, about that National Health service I used to have ...
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