Changing Trains

In the grand scheme of things, the fiasco surrounding the award of the West Coast rail license to FirstGroup counts for little, but unfortunately it reminds us of what we already knew: ministers are responsible not for their departments, or to ordinary people. The only responsibility of a minister these days on which he or she will be evaluated by his or her prime minister is the fervour with which they hold the line.

Richard Branson & Virgin Trains said, over and over again, that FirstGroup could not possibly run the West Coast line on the terms upon which the contract had been awarded to them. Possibly that sounded like sour grapes from an incumbent who had been cheated of a lucrative contract but - if it were you or me - I think we might have just checked.

After all, the accusation from Virgin was not vague.

Time and time again, however, those tasked with defending the decision came out and said that everything was fine, no need to worry. Justine Greening, then Transport Secretary, is subject of an article in the Belfast telegraph from 28th August that is retrospectively damning. The article points out that the award to FirstGroup had been called into question by Virgin trains, The Labour Party and the Commons Transport Select Committee yet she still intended to sign the contract.

She was only prevented from signing the deal - and thereby committing taxpayers to a deal which would have cost them hundreds of millions of pounds - by legal action on the part of Virgin.

Moreover, her successor was hardly less staunch. Last month he told the Transport Select Committee: "I am satisfied that due diligence was done by the department and therefore the intention is to go ahead with the contract when we can. We are determined to press ahead with the award that we have made[.]"

When a Minister of the Crown tells MPs that he is satisfied with his department's due diligence, that satisfaction is supposed to predicated on something. Yet now the government is trying to shrug their failure on this question. We are told that "ministers could not be expected to delve into the minutiae of the [..] complex deals."

But of course, there was no need to delve into details. Virgin had already identified where the problem lay, and all it needed was for one of out Transport Secretaries to have the humility to think: "these guys are suing us ... maybe just check that out."

Had they done so, the scale of the blunder would have been immediately obvious, because FirstGroup was essentially placing a one-way bet against the UK taxpayer. A company worth £900 million was saying that if enormously optimistic forecasts of growth were achieved, then it would pay back £13.3 billion in cash by 2028. Repayment was staged in such a way that FirstGroup repaid comparatively little until almost nine years into the contract term.

In order to secure the considerable revenues of the West Coast line (£824 million last year) FirstGroup were only being asked to guarantee a sum of £190 million, which would have been what the taxpayer would have been able to recoup if FirstGroup went bust as the higher payments fell due.

You don't have to be a Dragon to reject this deal, yet at least two ministers backed it with extraordinary zeal, just as (one need hardly add) Jeremy Hunt backed the Sky deal before them. Presumably they, like FirstGroup, calculated that if a week is a long time in politics then 2021 was an eternity away.

The immediate loss to the taxpayer is being estimated at £300 million, which we can doubtless measure in terms of the firm cost-saving measures favoured by this government.

"Must These Have Voices?"

In retrospect, it wasn't really necessary to wage a massive campaign in Afghanistan to make the country (slightly less un-) safe for voters. It turns out that an honour guard around Hamid Karzai's photocopier would have done just as well.

Personally, Sordel has always felt that we should get democracy working here before imposing it on others. Lest we forget, the man currently cowering under the prime minister's desk was not elected (even by his own party) yet this has not stopped him grabbing the tiller and setting a course for the nearest iceberg. His predecessor was indeed elected, but he spent much of his premiership explaining why (much as he deeply respected the opinions of the overwhelming majority of the electorate) we'd be doing things his way for now. Having promised a referendum before further European integration, Labour decided to ratify the Lisbon Treaty without one, and the low cunning of this decision is confirmed by the failure of Ireland to pass a referendum on the same issue. Et cetera.

This is merely to say that democracy does not operate in the United Kingdom, but let us suppose that it did. Under a constituency system in which the winner takes all, the overwhelming majority of voters will live in a constituency where only two political parties can possibly win. Many people will live in a constituency where one political party has an insurmountable majority.

The smallest parliamentary majority is apparently Crawley, where the current incumbent is handing on by the varnish on her nails to a majority of 37. She's a Labour MP, so I fancy that her chances of holding the seat at the next election are slender. Let us imagine, however, that you live in Crawley at the time of the next election, the seat is won or lost by a single vote, and you find yourself on the winning end. Would this be a validation for you of the democratic system, to have made such a seemingly enormous difference? Or would you consider that the body of votes sloshing backwards and forwards had pretty much made your individual vote worthless? Democracy values all citizens equally, but does not value them highly.

Why, then, are we so persuaded of the value of the democratic system that we are willing to sacrifice lives in order to transform Afghanistan into one? Set aside for a moment patriotic concern for British troops; I am not convinced that is worth the death of a single individual of any nationality to establish a democracy in that country, even were it possible to do so.

Of course, I see that there are significant motives for governments to like democracies, whether domestic or foreign.

But why on Earth should we?