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First Capital Connect

I am very happy to talk about British Rail. The former rail regulator, Tom Winsor, said in this building, in my hearing, "When BR handed over the railways to the privateers, they were handed over in good order." He is not a dyed in the wool socialist like me; he is an objective observer who was a regulator. He also said that British Rail worked miracles on a pittance. It was desperately underfunded, but it still managed to run a railway. A report was produced by the organisation Catalyst, of which I was an active member. It discovered—amazingly—that the highest level of productivity for any railway in Europe happened under BR. BR had to be efficient because it had to work miracles on a pittance and because of the way in which it operated. The problem was that we did not invest enough in the railways and they became backward. We had Government after Government after Government who thought that the railways were dying, were in the past and riddled with trade unions; they did not like the railways. Even so, Mrs. Thatcher refused to privatise the railways. It was John Major who privatised them because he wanted to demonstrate his ripening machismo and that he was harder than Maggie.