Nationalising the railways might be popular but perhaps not for the reason people think

Owen Jones tells us that Labour should, to beat the Greens, announce some really popular policy like re-nationalising the railways. And this might well be popular but perhaps not for the reason that people are assuming:

But there are three clear commitments Labour could offer to win over Green defectors. First, renationalise the railways. It would cut through like few other policies, and probably prompt some voters to break out in spontaneous applause. Polling demonstrates a publicly owned railway has near-universal appeal, winning over well-heeled Tory commuters and Ukip voters alike. But it also has a totemic quality about it: a clear demonstration that Labour has taken a decisive stance against the untrammelled market in the era of market failure.

The real complaint, we feel, about the railways is not over who owns and or runs them. It's over the price of them.

It's common enough to see people complaining that UK ticket prices are among the highest in Europe. And they are, as a result of a deliberate political decision. More of the revenue to keep them running comes from ticket prices and less from direct subsidy than in most other countries. And that's the correct decision too. There's Britons who don't use a train from one decade to another: difficult to see why they should be taxed to provide cheaper transport for others.

And that's why nationalisation won't make much difference. Because doing so isn't going to reverse that decision that, by and large, people who use trains are the people who should pay to keep trains running. The only way ticket prices will come down is if the taxpayer gets dunned for it. And why should we?

Bad arguments against selling the government's stake in Eurostar

The same bad arguments crop up again and again in political debates. The government is now looking, as it planned in the 2013 Autumn Statement, to sell off its 40% stake in Eurostar, for about £300m, as part of a general plan to get £20bn from privatising assets. In response, one popular argument is that the government is throwing away an asset, part of the 'family silver' that generates a few million quid each year for the exchequer.

But as I have repeatedly argued, this makes no sense. Instead of holding £300m in railway shares it can pay down debt, earning (approximately) the same risk-adjusted return. Even if they gave it away, they could just tax the returns from the private sector. As I said before:

A firm, in doing business, puts capital to use. It uses a mix of physical and human capital and devotes it toward achieving tasks in order, usually, to turn a profit. From this capital you get a return. Train Operating Company margins average about 4% over the last ten years. The average company got more like 10%. FTSE100 companies seem to enjoy higher returns. Of course, operating profits are not share returns, but they tell more or less the same story. The extra couple dozen billion the government would need to spend on trains could equally be spent on equities or anywhere else for more or less the same risk-adjusted return. The return they got here could be put into trains.

If the government returns that couple dozen billion to the population at large, the government can tax the income that the private citizens make on the wealth, at a glance dealing with the problems of governments holding wealth—principally: they are not very good at picking winners. Or they could pay off debt and reduce their repayment costs—since the risk-adjusted return of gilts is priced in just the same way as other assets.

This is just a general application of the problem of government's holding assets, which I have written about at length:

So maybe the government should hold some wealth, I can see the arguments for and I can imagine some arguments against. But if it holds wealth it ought hold assets as broadly as possible: because it’s not placed to take gambles on particular assets; because doing so may distort markets directly; because holding assets takes them off the market and reduces allocative efficiency; and because holding particular assets may distort the incentives facing policymakers. Thus we should praise Gordon Brown for selling off gold just as we should praise Vince Cable and George Osborne for selling off the Royal Mail.

To be fair, in this case the French & Belgian state stakes are going to stop this 'privatisation' leading to big allocative efficiency gains, but these widely-made arguments are still extremely unconvincing.

What would we consider a successful railway system?

Under many measures, the railways have performed remarkably since privatisation. It is not surprising that the British public would nevertheless like to renationalise them, given how ignorant we know they are, but it's at least slightly surprising that large sections of the intelligentsia seem to agree.

Last year I wrote a very short piece on the issue, pointing out the basic facts: the UK has had two eras of private railways, both extremely successful, and a long period of extremely unsuccessful state control. Franchising probably isn't the ideal way of running the rail system privately, but it seems like even a relatively bad private system outperforms the state.

Short history: approximately free market in rail until 1913, built mainly with private capital. Government control/direction during the war. Government decides the railways aren't making enough profit in 1923 and reorganises them into bigger regional monopolies. These aren't very successful (in a very difficult macro environment) so it nationalises them—along with everything else—in the late 1940s.

By the 1960s the government runs railways into the ground to the point it essentially needs to destroy or mothball half the network. Government re-privatises the railways in 1995—at this point passenger journeys have reached half the level they were at in 1913. Within 15 years they've made back the ground lost in the previous eighty.

But maybe it's not privatisation that led to this growth. Let's consider some alternative hypotheses:

Was it a big rise in the cost of driving?

Was it the big rise in GDP over the period that did it?

Was it just something that was happening around the developed world?

Was it purely down to extra cash injections from the state?

Has it come at the expense of safety?

Has it come at the expense of customer satisfaction?

Has it come at the expense of freight?

Is it all driven by London?