TRASHFUTURE - *PREVIEW* Forced Reevesification feat. Gareth Dennis

Episode Date: May 3, 2024

We're joined by top tier friend of the show Gareth Dennis (@GarethDennis) of the Rail Natter YouTube channel to discuss 'Great British Railways,' the new Labour plan to 'renationalise' (sic) the trains while leaving all of the immense problems, rent-seeking middlemen, and supply chain issues in place. But also we cautiously venture north of the border to discuss recent attempts to create Sturgeonism Without Sturgeon Or Camper Vans. It's a whole lot! Check out Rail Natter here! https://www.youtube.com/c/GarethDennisTV LIVE SHOW ALERT: We will be performing live with special guest Nish Kumar at Between the Bridges in London on 29th May. Get tickets and info here! 

If you peel back all the good words and just look materially at what it's proposing, which is essentially the reintegration of the private train operating companies, so those are just the companies that put staff on trains, put staff in some of the medium and smaller stations, those companies... ALICE All the ones that like are customer facing and everyone hates. So goodbye to Avanti, goodbye to LNER, etc. etc. RILEY Exactly.

Well yeah, actually I don't know if LNER will still continue to be a thing, or whether they'll also get absorbed, given that LNER are currently still a nationally operated, half pseudo service. This was sort of my first thing, is that like so much of this stuff has kind of already happened. Yeah, exactly. Well this is it. It gets back to the fact that this is kind of... so the current government have said they, broadly their plan is similar, but they want the train

operating companies to remain as private entities. The current government have said that the public bodies could run them, which means by default that public bodies would end up running them because there's a reason why it's becoming harder and harder to get private companies to get involved in the train operating companies, the franchises of our rail system because the whole thing's disintegrated. So kind of by default, the current government are proposing what Labour are making a big song and dance about. So that's kind of the first thing is that the reality is that there's very little between what's currently being proposed by the conservatives and what's actually

being proposed here. If you peel back all the good talking, there's lots of good stuff in, kind of verbal stuff in the document, but in terms of material stuff, the actual things that will change, very little difference, which is I suppose a little bit frustrating. It exactly comes back to the point we'll talk about later as Ryle alluded to, of the biggest rent extraction, the biggest problems, and also the main thing you need to do to fix the railway are either not mentioned or are absolutely retained as they are. So I think it's worth pointing out that, once again, the train operating companies that you, a rail going passenger, interact with are not the biggest source of rent extraction

from the British railway system. They're annoying, difficult to deal with, and often a source of great headache, and not to mention inefficiency, but the actual source of all the rent extraction, as we've talked about before in this show and earlier episodes about the railways, is the Roscoe's, or the rolling stock leasing companies. Those will remain. Mason- The train landlords. Greg- Yeah, the train landlords. Exactly. Those are absolutely remaining. So just as the problem with the current government's proposals, Labour's proposal is to leave those exactly as they are. And this delighted one of the chief execs

of the Rolling Stone, you can tell that this has been done very much in collaboration with them. Actually there's some interesting stories behind the scenes somewhere about the relationship between spads going in and out of Roscoe's and the Labour Party. That's maybe another one for another time. ALICE This is about getting regime-pilled! As with health and equalities and stuff, it's like, so much Labour policy is being able to recognise a stitch up coming. METE Yeah, so that's an interesting... I don't want to necessarily pick on individuals, because there's some spads I've had quite a bit of

time for, but certainly there is clearly an established relationship there already. You know, those companies, so these big rolling stock operating, there are three really big ones and then a bunch of smaller ones. These rolling stock operating companies are like PFI Max. So the first thing they did was inherit on absolute cheap all of the rolling stock that we had paid for as British Rail. They just inherited that for like literally peanuts and then rented that back to us. But then for the new trains, what they've done is rather than us as a country going, we need some new trains, we can borrow these at zero percent interest basically. You know, we can borrow the money to pay for these at zero percent interest. No, no, what we're going to do is, and this will sound familiar, this

classic new labor stuff, although of course it was from a previous conservative iteration, was we will have a company that acts as a middleman and we pay them a load of money. They will then at commercial rates buy the new trains and then we'll rent them off them. And I'm sure that won't incentivise short trains, fewer trains, not buying new trains very frequently and so on and so on. Of course it did actually do those things. So to give an idea of the extent to which they extract rent. So a year or two ago, the amount of government subsidy into the railway as well as 12, 13 billion pounds, and the total profit that the rolling stock operating companies squirreled away, this is profit, not revenue, profit,

was 1.2 billion. So that's one in every 10 pounds the government gave the railway disappeared off to Panama. Like that's the level, and it's not, not every, there were a few reasons why it was that high for a couple of years ago. It's kind of dropped down to about half that. But still, it gives you an idea of the scale of which this is enormous extraction of public money straight into Panama. There's a reason why it goes into low tax and no tax havens to be lost from the human eye. So the Roscoe's left as they are, because they're fine. Mason- And also, the other thing that's being left as it is, which I think is less damaging to the rail infrastructure of the country, and more just annoying and weird, are the open

access operators. Which Gareth, can you please explain to us how we start TF Rail? I have a sort of an awkward thing here, where I feel like Gareth is grading my homework, because Riley asked me to explain these to him. And I put something in the notes to the best of my understanding, that I'm now hurling Garethwards. RILEY Okay, right. So, open access operators, they are different to the train operating companies. The train operating companies are kind of more heavily regulated within the original structure of the industry. Open access operators

are kind of like an overlay. They kind of like, they come in, they get to run a few trains here and there. They can be a bit wacky with it. They don't have a lot of the limitations, the limitations as a regulation that the incumbents, if you like, train operating companies do. So when we talk about open access operators, I'm talking about Grand Central, I'm talking about Lumo, the weird blue things that go up and down the East Coast mainline. I'm talking about hull trains, weirdly. Hull trains that should just be part of LNER. For some reason they're their own little thing. And also, Eurostar is an open access operator, but they're kind of for sort of weird high speed one reason, so we forget them.

Mason- Gareth, are you saying we could start TF Rail? Gareth- Yes, you could. And you know what? Because there was a surge about five, six years ago, a surge of weird guys proposing random train services from like X to Y, like just strange train combinations. So the issue with these, firstly, the reason they exist is that there is a perception that, firstly, in mainland Europe, where you have generally a lot more kind of capacity, residual capacity on the network. We talk about waste and capacity. Waste is considered a very bad thing in the UK, so we have no capacity. Well, in mainland Europe, generally the railways, not always, but generally the railways have residual capacity, which allows there to be a bit of breathing space

for open access operators to kind of run. Also open access operators kind of work with crossing country boundaries within mainland Europe, the overall European rail network. Again, not really a thing in the UK or in GB, should I say. So these open access operators are perceived on the European mainland to create competition to therefore drive down costs. So for example, in Italy, you've got the Trenitalia high speed services and then you've got an open access operator that runs alongside them. Well, if you've got a potential to run ten trains an hour, Trent and Tally are only running two, and the open access operator runs two, and you've got plenty of room for both of them, okay fine, there's a potential that might generate some benefits in competition.

ALICE You can kind of do the budget airlines of trains, and you can end up with Flick's train, like in Germany, which everyone hates. RILEY Exactly, yeah. ALICE But why be the kind of stellios of trains, why be the easy dead of trains, if you have to buy them, or rather lease them, from this kind of cartel of three companies? So yeah, the issue in Britain is, as you say, there's this... well, firstly, no capacity. So these open access operators, they're not providing a competition of benefit, all they're doing is being extractive, because they're, rather than the incumbent, so on

the East Coast mainline, rather than LNER running the service that the open access operator is instead hogging a path for, it's going to LUMO, it's getting, that's more additional extraction because they're not regulated. So they get to take more from the fare than the incumbent does. So more money leaves the rail industry. It adds complexity on a system that's already overcomplicated. Timetabling with all these open access operators that get their little fixed weird combination of stops is an absolute pig in a nightmare. So it makes our railway much more complicated. And also, those open

— exactly as you've alluded to — those open access operators could not exist without everything else. So without the fact that the track is basically paid for by the incumbent operators, the fact that those trains they run are actually maintained in depots that mostly maintain trains from other people. So all the infrastructure, and also the people, they don't train drivers from scratch, they just basically filch drivers from other companies. So they're not investing in the skills, they're just riding on the back of the rest of the industry. So they are deeply extractive, and of course being left exactly as they are.

ALICE This is beautiful, we have parasites on our parasites. RILEY Exactly. RILEY So basically, I would suggest to you, right, that any kind of creation of GB Rail, right, we're not calling it British Rail of course, because that's woke or something? ALICE No, because that sm woke or something? ALICE No. Because that smacks of the left, and they're terrified of that, so they're keeping the

Tory name, which is the very twee Great British Railways. METE And it's annoying, because it's just gonna be ten years before we get to the perfect name, which is British Rail, but anyway, that's another point. RILEY So, Great British Railways is going to essentially take over, it's gonna do almost almost like a sort of paper nationalisation, where most of the things that the customers see will look like the state, but most of the... it will still remain very expensive, it will remain weirdly inefficient, it will

have very little slack in its system, and a lot of that money is still going to get taken to Panama, and that's going to be the reason why you can't get from Manchester to London. ALICE Are we aware that this perfectly replicates the stage of, like, end stage British Rail, and was endlessly held up as one of the reasons why we could never go back, because it was so shit? RILEY It's funny, because, like, BR and its finally- well, BR and its almost-finally, as before the early 90s recession, was the most efficient

railway system- and we've talked about this before, this is table stakes- was the most efficient railway system in Europe. It was not perfect. I'm not under any illusions it was perfect. But it's like a lot of people say, oh, well you didn't live through British Rail, you shouldn't have an opinion on it. I'm not saying we go back to just recreating what was then, although it wouldn't be a bad idea compared to what's generally being discussed at the moment. No, no, we can do better.