Reappraisals (37 page)

On June 17, 2001, a few miles away from Barnsley, the “Battle of Orgreave” was reenacted this year for television. The June 1984 confrontation at Orgreave between striking miners and police was the most violent of the many clashes that marked Margaret Thatcher’s confrontation and defeat of Arthur Scargill and the National Union of Miners that year. Since then many of the miners have been unemployed—some of them took part (for cash) in the reenactment. It seems remarkable, and a little odd, that so desperate and political a struggle should already be getting the “heritage” treatment. It took three hundred years before the English got around to reenacting the Civil War Battle of Naseby a couple of hours to the south; Orgreave was rerun for television just seventeen years later.

Barnsley figured prominently in George Orwell’s
Road to Wigan Pier
, where he wrote unforgettably of the tragedy of unemployment in Britain’s industrial working class. In Wigan itself there is now not only a pier (Orwell famously remarked upon its absence) but also a signpost on the highway encouraging you to visit it.
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Next to the cleaned-up Leeds-Liverpool canal there stand The Way We Were Museum and The Orwell at Wigan Pier, a generic 1980s-era pub selling burgers and chips. Orwell’s “fearful northern slums” are gone—not only from the Wigan landscape but also, apparently, from local memory:
Memories of Wigan 1930-1970
, on sale at the museum, has some very pretty sepia pictures of salesgirls and shops, but of the pits and the workers whose condition drew Orwell there and gave Wigan a dubious fame, there is no mention.

The English capacity simultaneously to invoke and to deny the past—to feel genuine nostalgia for a fake heritage—is, I think, unique. It amounts, today, to a countrywide bowdlerization of memory.
⁵
And the remarkable alacrity with which industry, poverty, and class conflict have been officially forgotten and paved over, such that deep social difference is denied or homogenized and even the most recent and contested past is available only in nostalgic plastic reproduction, is what makes Tony Blair credible. He is the gnome in England’s Garden of Forgetting. Many British voters, when polled on the subject of their prime minister, claim to find him insincere and false; he is even, for some, dishonest—saying anything his hearers demand. But they accept him nonetheless—and anyway see nothing better on offer. Even away from London there is something about Blair that rings true—he is the inauthentic leader of an inauthentic land.

If this sounds harsh, look closely at Blair himself. Off camera, caught unawares, he has a nervous, haunted air. He is, after all, a gifted and intelligent politician and he must surely have some sense of the fragility of his own and his country’s condition. Whatever the rhetoric about the great prospects awaiting his new Britain, Blair knows that his fortuitous political success has only postponed the reckoning. Riding on Mrs. Thatcher’s coattails, New Labour has successfully displaced the past; and England’s thriving Heritage industry has duly replaced it with “the Past.” The debate on the future, however, has only just begun; and in a curious English way it is being driven by the crisis on the railways.

THERE ARE ONE HUNDRED twenty steam railways and steam railway museums in Great Britain, ninety-one of them in England alone. Most of the trains don’t go anywhere, and even those that do manage to interweave reality and fantasy with charming insouciance (in the summer you can ride Thomas the Tank Engine up the Keighley-Haworth line to visit the Brontë Parsonage in the West Riding of Yorkshire). They are patronized by hundreds of thousands every year. They represent the dream face of British trains, another world: lost, but authentic.

Meanwhile, the real, existing British railway system is nothing, as
Le Monde
gleefully noted recently, but a daily nightmare. Britain—and England especially—is a small, crowded country. Trains are essential and widely used. But except for the very first investors and not always for them, railways have rarely been a source of profit; with the coming of road transport—commercial and private—most of the old railway companies fell into debt, and in 1948 they were nationalized into British Railways (later British Rail). Much the same happened all over Europe.

But whereas state-run railways in continental Europe have since been the object of solicitous government attention and high levels of long-term public investment, in Britain nationalization was treated (by Left and Right alike) as the end of the story rather than the beginning. Long before Mrs. Thatcher, British governments and civil servants regarded trains as an annoying budgetary item to be rationalized and reduced at every opportunity. Lines were closed, investment held to a minimum, fares pushed as high as the market would bear. As a result, in its last year of existence, 1996, British Rail boasted the lowest public subsidy for a railway in Europe. In that year the French were planning for their railways an investment rate of £21 per head of population; the Italians £33; the British just £9.

Even so, the then-Conservative government chose to privatize British Rail. They were encouraged by the prospect of a quick profit from the sale of public assets into private ownership; but their chief motive was Prime Minister John Major’s need to be seen to be privatizing
something
—Mrs. Thatcher had by then sold off just about everything else, and privatization was the Conservative Party’s sole and only program. The integrated network was sold off in parts: train routes to train-operating companies, rolling stock to other companies, rails and stations to a new company called Railtrack.

The outcome has been a chronicle of disasters foretold. The theory was that train companies would compete over established routes, driving efficiency up and prices down. But trains are not buses.
⁶
A train route, like a train schedule, is a natural monopoly. Private train companies were, in practice, being granted a free run at a captive market. Meanwhile the logic of the market was applied no less wrongheadedly to maintenance. Railtrack was divested of all repair and maintenance tasks (and thousands of experienced engineers lost their jobs
⁷
)
. These were contracted out to private companies, who in turn subcontracted to unskilled casual labor for track repairs and inspection.

Everyone had an interest in cutting corners and postponing unprofitable or labor-intensive work. Railtrack spent money on spiffing up stations— which all could see—and neglected rail replacement. The company was contractually obliged to compensate train companies if track work delayed their trains, so it discouraged inspectors from making trouble or undertaking “nonessential” repairs. Train companies, in turn, rewrote their schedules to avoid being penalized for failure to conform to a timetable. Within a few years it was obvious that the free market, far from reducing inefficiencies, had made the railways worse than ever.

And more dangerous. In October 2000 a worn rail caused an express train to derail near Hatfield, north of London. Four passengers were killed. The resulting inquiry brought to light criminal negligence and mismanagement, as well as a confession from Railtrack that most of the national network was perilously close to collapse.
⁸
Railtrack’s shares have duly slumped from near £18 to £3.50. There is thus no private capital available to make good the damage, much less invest in improvements. As a consequence the government has once again been forced to promise heavy investment in the railways, despite having in theory divested itself of just that responsibility a mere five years ago.
⁹
Meanwhile, with many trains still running at reduced speeds to avoid further accidents, rail travel in Britain is passing through an interminable purgatory with no discernible light at the end of the tunnel.

In opposition, Labour attacked this botched privatization. They rightly saw Major’s Railway Act of 1993 as an unworkable absurdity, a form of asset-stripping, whereby the government chopped up a public service into marketable lots, sold them off for a quick profit, and refused to contemplate the human and economic costs of its handiwork. But once in office, Blair has been curiously silent. Indeed, encouraged by the Treasury (and some of the same senior civil servants who oversaw the rail privatization), he successfully pressed for a similar model to be applied in the sell-off of London’s Underground system.

Britain’s privatized railways are a cruel joke. Train users pay the highest fares in Europe for some of the worst (and as it turns out, most dangerous) trains in the Western world—and now, as taxpayers, they are paying out almost as large an annual subsidy as they were when the state owned the system. This might be more tolerable were it not for the widespread British awareness of developments overseas. You can now travel by train from Paris to Marseille in great comfort and just over three hours. The same distance in Britain (from London to, say, Pitlochry in Scotland) will take at least double the time and cost twice as much. There have been only four derailments on France’s peerless TGVs since they entered service in 1981; there were thirty-three deaths on the railways in Britain in 1999 alone.

Railways are a public service. That is why the French invest in them so heavily (as do the Germans, Italians, and Spanish). They treat the huge subsidy given their train system as an investment in the national and local economies, the environment, health, tourism, and social mobility. To some English observers and a few French critics too, these subsidies represent unforgivably huge losses—difficult to quantify because buried in national accounts, but a significant drag on the national budget. Most French don’t see it this way, however: For them railways are not a business but a service that the state provides for its citizens at collective expense. Any given train, route, or facility may not turn a profit, but the loss is offset by countervailing indirect benefits. To treat trains like a firm, best run by entrepreneurs whose shareholders expect a cash return on their investment, is to misunderstand their very nature.

On the evidence from across the Channel, the French would appear to have by far the better of the argument. Trains, moreover, are a good index to state involvement in other public services. The French and the Germans spend almost half as much again as the British on their health services—and this despite the size of Britain’s National Health Service, one of the world’s largest employers. I know from my own experience and that of my family that both the Italian and Belgian health systems are also distinctly better than their British counterpart.

The response of English
¹⁰
politicians to such embarrassing continental comparisons has been to point accusingly at the high levels of taxation, state control, and public expenditure in continental Europe. Is
that
what you want, they ask? You’ll pay a high economic price. Tony Blair in particular has made a fetish of Labour’s “restrained” approach to public expenditure. His government actually spends about the same on public social services, as a percentage of gross domestic product, as Mrs. Thatcher’s much-maligned Tory government did in 1984—a little less on education, a little more on health. Moreover, he and his supporters have consistently talked down the public sector as somehow dowdy and unexciting—when compared to the risks and benefits of private enterprise (hence his widely noted admiration for successful businessmen). That is one reason why Labour is now finding it so hard to recruit teachers, nurses, doctors, and policemen.
¹¹

The mood, however, is changing. For four years Tony Blair held out the promise of a Third Way, a carefully triangulated compromise between Anglo-American private economic initiative and continental-style social compassion. Today we hear little of the Third Way: Its prophet, Professor Anthony Giddens, so ubiquitous in Blair’s first term, has of late been conspicuous by his silence. Since the national trauma of the railway crisis, New Labour has instead become wholeheartedly devoted to “delivering” European levels of public service . . . but apparently at American levels of personal taxation. This is not going to happen. You can do almost anything you want with the past, but the future, like economic reality, is intractable. The British are moving inexorably toward a very hard choice.

This choice is conventionally presented as being for or against joining the euro, and so in a way it is. But the real issue is not the euro but Europe—or more precisely, the European social model. The English (unlike the Scots) still don’t feel very European—which is why the Conservative leader William Hague, warning that “the pound” was in danger, thought he could capitalize on English national sentiment in his 2001 election campaign. They probably never will. And a party that could demonstrate how Britain would be better off outside Europe and its currency might yet capitalize on this sentiment in a referendum on the subject. But the electorate has something quite different on its mind.

New Labourites rightly claim that Britain is a postpolitical (actually postideological) society. From this they deduce that people aren’t interested in doctrinal disputes over the state and the market. They just want whatever works—hence Blair’s carefully pragmatic emphasis on mixing public sector and private profit (which is why he pulls his punches even when faced with the mess on the privatized railways, a disaster he could legitimately blame on Tory incompetence and worse). But my own feeling is that England in particular is fast becoming a post-postpolitical society.

By this I mean that Thatcher and Blair have so successfully uprooted the old Left-Right, state-market distinctions that many people can no longer remember why they need feel inhibited in favoring a return to the state. Why, they ask, should we not have a transport network/health service/school system that works as well as the Swedish or French or German one? What does it have to do with the market or efficiency or freedom? Are the French less free because their trains work? Are the Germans less efficient because they can get a hospital appointment when they need it?