Rail chaos opens discussion of alternatives: Mutuals and co-ops offer community a stake, instead of rentiers who extract local wealth and without Whitehall centralisation

Photograph: Brighton Station from Pixabay (License) (Cropped)

One of the big issues in the past few weeks has been the Southern Railways shambles, that has again exposed deep problems with the British system of rail franchises - at least three rail franchises face major strike action in the coming weeks (Topham, 2016; Topham, 2016{2}).

The franchise system has faced plenty of criticism. At the core is that a rail franchise is little more than permission to set up a toll booth and start extracting rent, squeezed out with higher prices, cuts to staff and services, and limiting expensive maintenance (Chakraborrty, 2016; Woodman, 2012; Milne, 2012).

Solutions to what are natural monopolies is not a simple matter. As a result much was made of Jeremy Corbyn's 2015 leadership election promise to renationalise the railways (Mason, 2016) - a brave decision for a party all too easily beaten over the head as centralising, bureaucratic, exorbitant spenders with a disdain for free enterprise (Kellner, 2014).

The latest round of railway chaos put Corbyn's policy of renationalisation on the table for a Readers' debate in The Guardian yesterday (Marsh & Walsh, 2016). The nature of the discussion was interesting to watch.

There was positivity towards renationalisation to be found, with some pointing to the more than a few good examples of public run transport services around Europe. In Paris, or in Germany, there are well maintained railways that are run for considerably lower fares than in the UK (Williams, 2015).

However, it was particularly interesting to see the perception that the only options being offered came in the form of a polarised dynamic, limited to either privatisation under greedy rentiers or nationalisation under inflexible Whitehall bureaucrats.

In fact commenters even went beyond that to observe that the railways in Britain are actually both and neither. That the railways are a kind of national-corporate cartel, with infrastructure nationalised while profit-making services were privatised - even more confusingly, often into the hands of state-owned companies from other countries.

What was clear in people's thoughts was that by some means the running of the rails needs to be decentralised, either with more lines or with more options. That no one interest should be given too much leverage, whether trade unions or rentier investors. And that responsibility for the rails should not be separated from the train services.

That combination, of well run public service and the need for decentralisation, in fact plays into the actual substance of Corbyn's policy, which was for public though not necessarily state railways (Connor, 2015). What Corbyn actually called for was to mutualise the railways as worker-consumer coops.

In mutualism, there is a path that has cut across progressive party lines. From Labour, and obviously the Co-operative Party, to the Liberal Democrats, the idea of workers taking a greater stake has a deep history. Whether as worker-management co-operation, workers on boards, or share-ownership schemes, at least a low level version of mutualism has long been proposed by those on all sides. But the present crisis in Britain's services calls for a deeper commitment.

There is much that mutualism can offer, even within the slow to change framework of capitalism. Autonomy, not least, for people to exercise power over their own working lives. And equity, a meaningful stake in the product of their own work. Between the two, you have a model that challenges both the lopsided struggle between workers and management that often leads to exploitation, on the one hand, and the extraction of wealth, on the other.

Fear of alienation by bureaucratic centralism is understandable in the running of essential services, from housing to energy and transport. But so is the pain caused by exploitative, extractive rentiers, and it has been clearly stated. Too much is taken out of communities, extracted as profit by rentiers (Milne, 2014) - who use wealth to step in and set up toll booths on essential local services. Little is ever fed back into the communities from which these private taxes are levied.

Mutualism and cooperation present an alternative. Working examples are already out there, tying the product of a community's resources to those communities, serving the common good without overbearing central control. But they need support to break through public-private corporatism and that means government to rethink how it intervenes - to be smarter and willing to decentralise.

References

Gwyn Topham's 'Southern rail strike: day two of commuter misery amid war of words - Operator cancels 946 of 2,242 trains as RMT announces separate strike action by members on Virgin Trains East Coast'; in The Guardian; 9 August 2016.

Gwyn Topham's 'Eurostar workers to strike in dispute over work-life balance: Members of the Rail, Maritime and Transport union will walk out for seven days over two weekends in August'; in The Guardian; 10 August 2016{2}.

Aditya Chakrabortty's 'More freeloaders than free market. How Britain bails out the business chiefs: It’s a scandal. Charlatans in pinstripes are being allowed to wring dry their companies, with the taxpayer footing the bill'; in The Guardian; 14 June 2016.

Peter Woodman's 'Virgin Rail set to lose franchise'; in The Independent; 14 August 2012.

Seumas Milne's 'Rail is a gigantic scam for siphoning off public money: Branson and FirstGroup have both gamed a disastrous privatisation. The case for public ownership is compelling'; in The Guardian; 28 August 2016.

Rowena Mason's 'Jeremy Corbyn to announce rail nationalisation plan: In first major policy call at party conference, leader will reveal that returning railways to public sector would be one of first acts of Labour government'; in The Guardian; 20 September 2015.

Peter Kellner's 'Railways: Miliband gets it right'; from YouGov; 7 July 2016.

Sarah Marsh & James Walsh's 'Should our rail services be renationalised? Readers' debate: Amid strikes, rising fares and delays, catch up on our debate on whether it’s time to put our rail service back into public ownership'; in The Guardian; 11 August 2016.

Lee Williams' 'Our rail system is broken, and nationalisation has already been proven to work — so what are we waiting for? Train fares in the UK are some of the most expensive and inefficient in Europe, yet the Government doesn't seem to care'; in The Independent; January 2015.

Jacqui Connor's 'Jeremy Corbyn would clear the deficit – but not by hitting the poor'; from the website of John McDonnell; 12 August 2015.

Seumas Milne's 'The tide is turning against the scam that is privatisation: The international revival of public ownership is anathema to our City-led elite. But it's vital to genuine economic recovery'; in The Guardian; 9 July 2014.

Oliver Balch's 'Energy co-ops: why the UK has nothing on Germany and Denmark - The community energy sector needs to look to more innovative models to survive the loss of government support and cuts to subsidies'; in The Guardian; 2 October 2015.