The outcome of the rail dispute will be costly and chaotic

Editorial: There is no reason, including safety, why the railways should be exempt from change, and no reason to believe that there is no better way to spend public money

The latest industrial action looks and feels highly dogmatic, and counterproductive (PA)

Were Britain’s railways entirely privately owned, operating entirely independently, and lightly regulated only by general company and competition law, it might be appropriate, even commendable, for ministers to stay out of the current dispute. In reality, of course, the railways are anything but, and are much closer to being creatures of the state than free agents taking their chances in the free market.

Various parts of the railway network and its operations are in fact publicly owned; the franchises the train operators enjoy are awarded by the state for a limited period; their fare structures are dictated by ministers, in effect; they are subject to special safety regulation by the government, and the Treasury pays for much of the still-huge programme of investment in them, and subsidised them before, during and after the Covid lockdowns.

So Grant Shapps is acting rather foolishly in pretending that the government isn’t an active interested party in this dispute. If nothing else, the government ought to take notice of the wider damage to the economy that these stoppages will cause, and do everything it can to mediate the dispute – both in its own interest as shareholder and chief funder and taxpayers more widely.

It looks and feels highly dogmatic, and counter-productive. It is very much the kind of stance that used to be taken under Margaret Thatcher, most notoriously during the miners’ strike of 1984-85. Many thought it incredible at the time, and we now know there was much collaboration between ministers and bosses to thwart the unions. So it is now. It is difficult to believe that Mr Shapps isn’t intimately aware of what is going on.

It is an especially dangerous moment because the RMT union is one of the more effective when taking strike action, and it thinks through strategy and tactics. The rail workers, if they are solid, will bring most of the transport network to a standstill in the biggest stoppage in decades.

At last, from their point of view, the unions have been able to overcome the fragmentation of their industry and the ban on secondary action by coordinating cross-company and cross-sector action. With a tactic pioneered on the Tube, a succession of phased one-day actions will maximise disruption, leaving rolling stock in the “wrong” places to bring services swiftly back to normal. Strike pay has been increased to reduce the loss of regular pay by the strikers, and there is threat of a succession of actions through the summer.

Mr Shapps seems unwilling to do much about all this beyond asking Sir Keir Starmer to call the strike off, which he couldn’t even if he wanted to.

If he was to delegate his ministerial powers to Sir Keir or to the shadow transport secretary, Louise Haigh, Mr Shapps might be on to something. But of course he is not, and he is posturing – much to the dismay of the (non) travelling public. Perhaps Mr Shapps is looking for a promotion in the next reshuffle or even greater preferment under a new leader, but a protracted dispute he is on track to lose will do his career prospects no good at all.

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The most likely conclusion to the dispute is a messy one, with the government making costly concessions that it could be making now. What the dispute will not do, and here Mr Shapps does have the better of the argument, is to modernise and raise productivity on the railways, and help the industry adjust to the post-pandemic changes in commuting and patterns of usage.

There is no reason, including safety, why the railways should be exempt from change, and no reason to believe that there is no better way to spend public money. It also seems apparent that the semi-privatised railway, ironically owned by the French and German public on some lines, hasn’t been an unalloyed success since the Major government hurriedly sold them off in the 1990s.

There is much for Mr Shapps to talk to the unions and to the rail companies about. Eventually, he will have to put his struggling locomotive into reverse.