Rail Partners’ ‘Track to Growth’ : Reanimating the corpse of rail privatisation RMT Briefing
Rail Partners ‘Track to Growth’ document is a slightly less confident, less heroic but no less partial and dishonest version of an established private sector ‘Trade narrative’. Since privatisation, Rail Partners and their predecessor organisation, the Association of Train Operating Companoes (ATOC), have produced intermittent documents that attempt to claim credit the growth in passenger numbers and attribute this to the innovation and efficiency brought by the private sector.1 What distinguishes this latest document is a consistent attempt to paint the rail industry as an example of a ‘public private partnership’. The political motivation for this is clear. It is designed to redescribe continued private sector train operation in terms that are appealing to people who are indifferent to the mode of delivery and purport to be interested only in ‘results’. In reality, Track to Growth is little more than an attempt to reanimate the corpse of privatisation using rehashes of old arguments that gloss the wretched record of the private sector on rail and its value-extractive nature.
The idea of the trade narrative is explored in Andrew Bowman, Peter Folkman, Julie Froud, Sukhdev Johal, John Law, Adam Leaver, Michael Moran and Karel Williams (2013), 'The Conceit of Enterprise: train operators and trade narrative', https://foundationaleconomycom.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/the-conceit-of-enterprise.pdf 1