East Coast showed us what a renationalised railways would be like

Two years ago, I was on my way back to London from my first Party conference in Manchester. The train carriage was rammed, with the heating inexplicably on full blast. This situation was made worse by the buffet being closed, so with no water for the two hours we were stuck in oven-like conditions.

Not fun – but not exactly life-endangering, and Virgin Trains offered me two first class tickets to any part of their network as compensation.

I mention this merely because it is a good example of how, under privatisation, our railways now ‘do’ customer service. Yes, there is still enormous room for improvement. And, yes, train travel can be utterly maddening – as anyone stuck at Finsbury Park after Christmas knows only too well. But the upshot of my trip back from conference was that I thought Virgin Trains were actually bothered about whether or not I’d want to travel with them again.

Why, then, is renationalising the railways so bizarrely popular – even with Conservative voters? People almost willingly ignore how much better our trains are than the squalid service that state-owned SNCF runs to some loose timetable on the other side of the Channel.

Yet you don’t have to go to France to see what a renationalised railways would be like for the travelling public: look no further than our own East Coast service, which was run by the Department for Transport for five years. The chaos at King’s Cross last Christmas was caused by state-owned Network Rail, but compounded by the customer service of then nationalised East Coast trains, whose operation propped up the bottom of the national railways performance tables before the company was returned to the private sector a month ago.

'Privatisation' gave Britain the world's fastest steam locomotive

(Telegraph)

Let me explain it another way.

Remember how privatised Virgin Trains made up for my poor travelling experience? Well, in early January my cousin was travelling from Aberdeen to Kings Cross on ‘nationalised’ East Coast. My cousin has muscular dystrophy and is stuck in a wheelchair. Alas, the train’s disabled lavatory was out of service for the entire seven hours of the journey – and his request for help via the disabled assistance button was ignored.

Not unreasonably, he wrote to East Coast. The state-owned company replied – two months later – by sending him a voucher for £10. A tenner! I can’t imagine Richard Branson would regard ten quid as anything other than a slap in the face of a disabled man ignored by the train staff, and unable to pee for the best part of a public sector working day.

Many people remember British Rail as a proxy for a halcyonic Britain that never existed. But it was free enterprise that gave us our railway glory days, with ‘privatised’ LNER’s Mallard breaking the speed record and Glasgow’s ‘privatised’ North British dominant as the world’s largest locomotive builder, selling to all corners of the globe.

Nationalisation in 1948 put a stop to all that: British Rail was an introspective operation that closed down railway lines, treated passengers badly and built locomotives that we couldn’t export. Its head office was nicknamed ‘The Kremlin’ – and with good reason.

Miliband’s lot would put the faceless apparatchiks at the Department for Transport back in charge of our trains; leaves on the line would be the least of our worries. The East Coast franchise was a timely reminder of what renationalised railways would be like – and my cousin has the £10 voucher to prove it.

First published by Conservative Home on April 2nd, 2015

(Only) three reasons to vote Conservative in May

The polls say the election’s outcome is up in the air, but one thing is clear – the Tories are close to passing the 36.1% share of the vote won in 2010. No mean feat given the perils and challenges of five years in office. Of course there have been a few facepalm moments (ask me after May and I’ll give you my list) but overall David Cameron’s government has been one of innovation and reform – not a bad record when the books left by Labour offered little room to breathe.

That I’ll be voting for the Tories on May 7th is hardly a revelation given that I stood for council on the blue ticket last May, enjoyed (rather than endured) my first party conference a couple of years ago and have traipsed off to all sorts of by-elections around the country. But forget the slightly tame election promises and #LongTermEconomicPlan – here are three concrete reasons why I’ll be out pounding the pavements for the Tories in the run-up to May 7th – and why you should consider voting for Conservative too.


Apprenticeships

It is the Conservatives who are the party of opportunity – not Labour – and if you want proof of that just look at the how we’ve revitalised apprenticeships. I’m not sure whether it’s healthy to have a favourite graph, but here’s mine. Note how women have been doing better under the Conservatives then under Labour.

In 2010 the Conservatives committed to creating 400,000 apprenticeships. Here we are five years on and we’ve created 2,000,000 apprentices. In comparison Labour’s idea of opportunity was telling everyone to go to university: ‘why do an apprenticeship when you can have a degree?’ This was a betrayal of the idea that some people might actually be able to enter the workforce and secure skilled, well-paid employment by in-work training, paid for by the employer.

Apprenticeships were a massive part of Britain when we made things and exported to the world, but cruelly Blair and Brown saw them simply in the context of their inept class war. Besides, who needs skilled British workers when you’re one of three EU countries not to put in place freedom-of-labour controls when the EU expanded eastwards? Much easier to bring over the cream of the Accession States’ workforce.

And note how quickly Labour have forgotten their disgraceful record on apprenticeships:

Guaranteed with a Labour govt → 80,000 more high quality apprenticeships so every school leaver with the grades has the chance to get on.
— The Labour Party (@UKLabour) February 17, 2015

Wow, 80,000 apprentices. That’s 80% fewer than the Tories promised in 2010, and 4% of the apprentices created during the five years of this Tory government. It is David Cameron’s government that has done the hard work of rebuilding apprenticeships, which are so important in the fight to upskill our workforce, improve productivity – and transform people’s lives.

RT to let friends know we've delivered 2 million apprenticeships since 2010 - helping young people get on in life. https://t.co/n6PdgpNsd5
— Conservatives (@Conservatives) December 22, 2014

Public Transport

Crossrail tunnels (John Zammit)

Like most people in the South East travelling on the railways and underground is a big part of my life, and the good news is that this government has poured enormous amounts of money into future-proofing the transport network.

Labour electrified 13 miles of railway under Blair and Brown. One poxy mile per year in government. In comparison we’ve just about finished electrifying the entire railway from London to Wales in five years. Work on Crossrail (London’s new East-West underground line) is on target for completion in 2018, by which point Crossrail 2 will be well underway – much to the relief of Northern Line commuters. George Osborne was under pressure to cancel these projects, but he recognised how vital it was to have transport that was worthy of London’s position as one of the world’s great cities. Likewise hundreds of railway platforms across the country have been lengthened to accommodate longer trains that are being brought into service – why we’re not shouting about this I have no idea.

And an enormous overhaul of railways in the North-West is being delivered – new electric trains through Manchester on the new Ordsall viaduct, with big service improvements – like Chester to Manchester in under 40 minutes (over an hour at present). Labour likes to think the North is its home turf, but what did they do for commuters in Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool, Preston, and so on? The Conservatives have made the investment that is helping increase the reliability and capacity of the railways, and helping more people get a seat in the morning.


Leadership

Perhaps the most contentious of the three points, but I really do think David Cameron has shown genuine leadership as Prime Minister in the past five years. He has held together a government with the Liberal Democrats, our most despised opponents. I was on the officer team of a rock solid Tory Association outside the M25 for much of this parliament, and vividly recall our Chairman announcing his defection to UKIP as the first item on our AGM – so I have some insight into how difficult his position must have been.

Yet look at the alternatives. Wind up the government half way though? We’d have been slaughtered in the polls. Avoid addressing gay marriage? Labour would have introduced it from the opposition benches and caused all sorts of havoc. Cameron didn’t bow to UKIP’s agenda, the wisdom of which can be seen as the latter’s credibility disintegrates in the run-up to May 7th. It’s easy to bag Ed Miliband, but has he demonstrated the qualities needed to lead a government as Leader of the Opposition? I – and seemingly many others – think not. And Clegg’s lot has found coalition politics to be as comfortable as snuggling up to a boa constrictor, with single figure poll ratings since 2011. This May will see seats turning blue that have been yellow for decades.

There’s also the issue of the European Union referendum. I’ve always felt our EU membership is like an unhappy marriage: we need to try counselling before we divorce, and that’s what Cameron’s renegotiation is all about. Let’s see how serious Brussels is about changing. The EU is a political construction for wealth redistribution and regulation generation completely at odds with European project’s founding aim of building peace through economic activity, and I’d almost certainly vote to leave. But I want a proper national debate before any decision, and my gut instinct says that rushing a referendum makes a vote to stay in more likely – and then where will we be? Confirmed members of an EU that has little incentive to reform. So the Prime Minister is spot on: 2017 is the right date to hold the referendum.

Perhaps David Cameron will never be held in the same affection as our party’s great leaders, but I can’t imagine he’s particularly bothered. What I imagine he does worry about is getting Britain heading in the right direction after the precarious position that Labour left us in 2010 – and he’s done a pretty good job of that.

—

Which brings me back to my starting point. Back in the depths of 2013 I bet a particularly recalcitrant district councillor £20 that we’d be ahead in the polls in the run-up to the general election – and here we are, ahead in the polls and ready for the heat of the final weeks before polling day. Apprenticeships, transport and leadership are small fry in the bigger picture of rescuing the nation’s economy. But they’re indicative of a government that has taken tough decisions, improved people’s lives, and put us on the right course for the years ahead. That’s a record I’m proud to campaign on – and one that appeals to the heart as much as the head.

First published by Platform 10 on March 25th, 2015

Britain was built by private enterprise – so why is ‘privatisation’ so unpopular?

Lately there’s been a lot of talk about the ‘P’ word: privatisation. Ed Miliband’s team hasn’t done the hard policy work to revitalise Labour as a party of government, and it is beginning to show. His platform for next May has a lot of sticky plaster policies, but very little that addresses structural problems like the housing market and transport costs, to name two issues close to my heart. Instead, catnip like ‘no privatisation of our NHS’ and ‘reversing the privatisation of the railways’ is being wheeled out to fill the Left’s policy void.

This conveniently ignores the Blair and Brown government’s enthusiasm for market – rather than state – solutions. Some people know about Hinchingbrooke, the NHS hospital so ineptly run by the state that Andy Burnham ‘privatised’ it when he was Secretary of State. Fewer know that Circle – the private sector company that took control of Hinchingbrooke along with a 50 per cent staff mutual – has done a decent job of turning around something that was – if you’ll excuse the pun – a real hospital pass.*

Just why is privatisation seen as so politically toxic, when much of what we love in Britain has been shaped by private enterprise? Take tertiary education, where students attend the privately run institution of their choice. Our universities have always been ‘privatised’, with the model of academics and faculties competing for research funding well established. Yet the idea of such a system for our primary and secondary schools would currently be politically unacceptable, even though universities like Cambridge and UCL are world beaters – just look at the latest QS rankings, where four out of the world’s top six institutions are British.

And that’s the whole point of privatisation: creating a market where competition drives improvements in quality and efficiencies in price. Try telling that to the British public, who overwhelmingly want to see the railways renationalised – including a majority of Conservative voters. People dislike their trains being run by foreign state operators, but isn’t the point of the railways to move people around, rather than be some sort of national bauble?

Competition has been fantastic for train passengers in the post-British Rail era. This is hardly surprising given that the great triumphs of Britain’s railways were the product of healthy rivalries between private companies – from the Rainhill Trials through to the speed wars in the 1930s that resulted in Mallard, the world’s fastest locomotive. Our railway infrastructure was delivered by companies not wanting to miss out on market share, but today the government is desperately playing catchup after decades of neglect under state ownership – and building HS2 at a pace that would have appalled our Victorian ancestors.

The 2015 General Election campaign is already well underway, and perhaps you’ll hear someone talking about the evils of privatisation in a queue at the Post Office, only to realise that you’ve never had to endure a 40 minute wait at Sainsbury’s or Tesco. That’s because the supermarkets are in competition, and if they made their customers wait that long they know they’d be out of business. They’re also fairly good at keeping down costs for their users – something that we desperately need in our NHS if the principle of free healthcare for all is to survive the challenges of an ageing population and increasing treatment costs. So that’s the sort of privatisation we should be talking about: driving up quality of service, bringing down costs – and no lengthy waits before the automated voice directs you to ‘Till Number Three’.

First published by Coffee House on December 17th, 2014

* About two weeks after this was published Circle announced that it was handing back its operation of Hinchingbrooke to the state. Writing in the Guardian, former Labour MP Tom Levitt said that 'the failure of Circle at Hinchingbrooke hospital, in Huntingdon, where the company very nearly managed to remove an operating loss inherited from the public sector, was due to the failure of the NHS to deliver its side of the bargain, not least the over-demand on A&E which was well above what the company was told to expect.'

David Cameron and the Pope as bosom eurobuddies? I didn’t see that one coming.

Did you miss the big speech on Europe? Fresh from pushing his followers towards a more liberal line on gay rights, it was David Cam – actually it was Pope Francis who made the most telling intervention on the future of the EU, warning MEPs in Strasbourg that the European project was ‘no longer fertile and vibrant’ and ‘slowly losing its own soul’.

He is right. Millions of British small businesses already know that the EU’s appetite for regulation is denting their competitive advantage – Brussels-approved oven gloves being the most recent example of a regulatory mindset that is at odds with the founding vision of creating wealth and security through trade between nations. Everyone in business has their own examples of how Europe’s bureaucrats have given them the benefit of their limited wisdom: vacuum-cleaner manufacturer James Dyson is critical of ‘sustainability legislation that rewards sustained mediocrity and waste’ and is taking the European Commission to court over its latest efficiency regulations. I know who I’d trust to make decent domestic products – and it isn’t Jean-Claude Juncker.

That the European Commission is so blind to the realities of commerce is hardly surprising. Only a handful of the 28 commissioners have any meaningful commercial experience running the sorts of businesses that ultimately pay their bills. The vast majority come from the law, academia and professional political careers, which perhaps explains their surprise that an unexpected bill for £1.7bn might piss off the unfortunate people having to cough up the readies. Likewise a shortfall to the tune of €259bn would prompt a fairly robust internal efficiency drive in the business world.

There is an arrogant culture of command economics, and you know we’re in deep trouble when the Commission President says ‘If Europe invests more, Europe will be more prosperous and create more jobs – it’s as simple as that’. Pope Francis’s description of the ‘bureaucratic technicalities’ of the EU’s institutions is spot on.

Over to the other speech on Europe: David Cameron was very good. Immigration is a big concern for people – I certainly found that canvassing back before the last general election. The UK’s system for redistributing wealth does throw up some clear incentives to up sticks from countries less well off than the UK. But remember that freedom of movement can also equate to asset stripping of nations, and in the past decade we’ve undoubtedly benefitted from harvesting some of the brightest, most laborious and entrepreneurial people from the EU’s newest members – and what their home country has gained in remittances, it has certainly lost in people with energy and innovation to drive their domestic economies forward. Tighter immigration controls may well be more palatable to scrapping tax credits for migrants (which I worry risks creating an underclass of migrants living on very, very little) but the depth of EU reform needed to restore controls over movement might require divine intervention.

So the battle to shape the future of the EU was laid out by two very different voices. One rooted in pragmatic politics, with a tougher line on immigration pitching to Labour’s blue collar voters as much as it is aimed at neutering, if not shooting, Nigel Farage’s fox. But it was the man from the Vatican whose critique resonated strongest with me, given the immense challenge of reforming the EU in the face of inertia from beneficiary states, not to mention the 23,000 people employed in Brussels’ ivory towers. Cardinal Bergoglio’s career was built on humble service and fiscal discipline with the Church’s resources, which sounds like something that the lawyers and professors of the Commission should be up for. But David Cameron and the Pope as bosom eurobuddies? I didn’t see that one coming.

First published by Platform 10 on December 8th, 2014

My letter to Professor Arthur, Provost at UCL

Dear Professor Arthur,

I am a UCL Geography graduate, and loved my time at University College. London is an expensive place to be a student, but the biggest single help in managing my finances was riding my bicycle to university every day, rather than being stung by public transport costs.

You may have seen that the Mayor has launched an ambitious programme of segregated cycle lanes in Central London. This has been opposed by a few powerful business groups, and UCL is a member of one of these – London First. However if you've followed the issue you'll also have noticed that top graduate employers are backing the new cycle infrastructure. Deloitte says "cycle highways will help us attract & retain the people our business needs to thrive", while Simon & Schuster says "a growing number of our employees cycle to work. More would if they felt safer on the road".

I realise UCL's membership of London First goes way beyond cycling infrastructure, but I know I speak for my classmates in encouraging you to distance UCL from their hostility towards the new bike lanes. Will you publicly throw UCL's weight behind the Mayor's plans for improving the lot of London's cyclists – many of whom are your students and staff?

Best wishes,


Matthew Plummer

---

POSTSCRIPT (6th November, 2014) Success! UCL has just announced full support for the Mayor's new bike infrastructure – see https://www.ucl.ac.uk/greenucl/greenucl-news-publication/ucl-backs-proposed-cycle-superhighway

Four months of campaigning in Latchmere, AKA Operation 'Snatch the Latch'

I've had a few days to digest Wandsworth's 2014 borough elections – and my first time standing as a candidate. That in itself was hugely exciting as being able to tell someone that I will do my best is infinitely better than saying that I'm calling on behalf of John / Joanna Bloggs, who is / will be a great champion for their community, etc. It was a fun campaign, and I managed to get a few things done for people who were of the 'I'm not voting because you're all as bad as each other' persuasion - and hopefully changed their minds. But with a 35% turnout the reality is a lot of people just don't care about having their say in how the local council is run, which is a pity, as most of the services they use on a daily basis stem from the Town Hall rather than Westminster.

I was selected back in... February, I think? It seems like an age ago, but actually wasn't that long – and certainly not long enough to loosen the grip that Labour has on Latchmere, a ward that has never elected a Tory councillor – not even back in the days of 0% Poll Tax, when my friend Tim Loughton took Labour's majority down from 1500 to 300. Operation 'Snatch the Latch' was always a bit of a long shot. My result saw us hold our share of the vote at 2010 levels* (despite our government now sitting just behind Labour in the national polls), but I came fourth, just under 700 votes behind the last of Labour's three candidates. I campaigned hard, but it wasn't enough, and the sole consolation is knowing that we managed to tie down some of Labour's resources that would have otherwise gone to the neighbouring battleground ward where we squeaked in two councillors in a very tight contest.

There were some wonderful moments during the campaign. I made new friends, met people with fascinating stories and was occasionally distracted from canvassing long enough to make the process feel more like an exercise in getting to know a community than simply compiling a database on how people would vote. A woman told me about growing up in the slums that were cleared where the Winstanley Estate is now, and about how her grandfather remembered Battersea before it was heavily developed. Latchmere Road back then was simply a dirt track known as 'Pig Hill' and used as a route for taking livestock from Clapham Common to the market. One guy told me he'd be voting Tory because 'you don't solve a cost of living crisis by fixing prices – you do it by taking less money from us in the first place' – I should have passed his details on to Lynton Crosby. Another woman – previously canvassed as 'strong Labour' (but married to a 'strong Conservative') told me that 'Maggie Thatcher abolished me, but you seem lovely and so you can have a hug'. Apparently riding a fixie makes me 'far too cool to be a councillor'. And then there was the time I was biking down Sheepcote Lane on my way home from some canvassing, when a large A4 Pacific steam locomotive rushed past – an amazing sight, and almost up there with the view from the 20th floor of Dresden House.

Blue vs Red at Battersea Labour's HQ

Election day was madness – albeit carefully planned madness. I was humbled at how many of my friends came to help, and the memory of them 'knocking-up' our supporters in Battersea Fields and on the Winstanley will stay with me for a long time. I'm normally a fairly sedate cyclist, but I'm still a little amazed that I didn't have some horrific smack on May 22nd as I hared between polling stations, campaign teams and our committee room. Note to self: if standing for election again take extra shirts for polling day, as one of the Labour candidates told me afterwards that she'd thought I was a well turned out bloke in a tweed jacket, and was surprised when I showed up at the count looking like I'd run a marathon in my shirt, jeans and converses. We started at 5am, and by the time I got to the count I was – suffice to say – exhausted, but not so tired that I couldn't keep up the family rule of having a drink with the opposition once the results were announced. I'm sure this raised some eyebrows on our side, but it's a good tradition as it means you need to fight a hard – but fair – campaign, and ultimately we're still all residents of Wandsworth once the elections are done and dusted. And this is how I came to find myself playing fußball with Battersea Labour's parliamentary candidate Will Martindale and their organiser Sean Lawless as dawn broke on Friday, with one of their activists (clearly a Blairite) lumped together with me as 'Team Tory'. They are decent people who just happen to be profoundly wrong about how we build a better community and improve people's living standards. Labour beat us on the night, but we'll bounce back stronger – after all (as I pointed out to the comrades at 6am) that's what the markets are all about: good, healthy competition driving us on to better things.

* Apparently our result in Latchmere was the best of any opposition held seat in Wandsworth.

First published by Bright Blue on June 2nd, 2014

Buying sex shouldn't be criminalised: some thoughts on New Zealand's experience

Every so often our politicians declare that ‘it’s time to prosecute men for buying sex’; most recently with Caroline Spelman’s call for men to make their views clearer about prostitution. I’m one of few men who’ll own up to visiting brothels and spending time with call girls. Alas – for those getting hot under the collar with anticipation – my time spent cruising red light zones was strictly professional: I spent most of 2008 photographing sex workers in New Zealand for my dissertation, which documented how the country’s decriminalisation of sex work in 2003 had changed the industry.

New Zealand’s prostitution law reform sidestepped passing judgment on the ethics of prostitution, focusing simply on improving ‘the welfare and occupational health and safety of sex workers’. This might sound bureaucratic, but women in the sex industry are now protected by society, rather than marginalised from it. I remember the case of a bloke who’d pulled his condom off when he was in a brothel. The $400 fine the courts served him seemed paltry; but his name was published when the local newspapers covered the case. He was the bad person, rather than the ‘woman of ill repute’ he’d been visiting, which seemed pretty reasonable to me.

From 'The New Professionals' (Matthew Plummer)

My experience from the dozens I met in the industry was that sex work is remarkably mundane, and the stories I heard about the (mostly) men who paid for sex were pretty humdrum: widowers, couples who’d stopped having sex, and so on. But I can’t remember meeting sex workers who expressly disliked their job. Many were comfortable – even proud – of what they did for a living, with the main complaint being that decriminalisation had seen a slump in their earnings. This (I was told by an MP who debated the 2003 legislation) came down to basic economics, with price being a product of supply and demand. And on that basis criminalising the purchase of sex would be a nasty double whammy for prostitutes, as not only would they be at the mercy of clients on the wrong side of the law, but it would also drive down earnings: hardly the way to look after vulnerable people.

Of course the press loves running stories of women brought to the UK and forced into sex work; trafficked victims in heels and lipstick make for far more exciting copy than cases of domestic servitude or forced agricultural work. The English Collective of Prostitutes has done a comprehensive rebuttal of the girls-trafficked-into-prostitution misconception which is worth reading, and various estimates on the numbers of women being trafficked to Britain to work as prostitutes have proved to be wildly inaccurate. This doesn’t surprise me; statistics gathered by the police in New Zealand in the aftermath of the 2003 decriminalisation showed the numbers of active sex workers had been overstated by a factor of ten. The murky legal and social status of the profession makes gathering hard data almost impossible, and I can’t imagine that things are any different over here. Far better to bring it out of the shadows, with taxes paid and health and safety regulations enforced, rather than creating a needlessly dangerous underworld and wasting valuable police resources.

First published by Coffee House on May 16th, 2014