A Chinese lesson for the birthplace of rail中国给铁路诞生地的启示

Excitingnews emerged last week from the world's largest train manufacturer, especially forthose of us who love to travel at high speed.

ChinaRailway Rolling Stock Corp (whose parent CRRC Group is State-owned) is lookingto develop a "maglev" train that will be capable of traveling at upto 600 km per hour ‑ twice as fast as the best bullet trains currently inoperation.

Now,this is only an announcement and no doubt it will be some time before we seetrains able to travel at half the speed of sound.

Butthe news got me thinking, all the same, about the dire state of rail transportin my home country.

Britainis known as the birthplace of the railways - in fact, it has one of the densestrail networks in the world.

Yetlittle has been done to improve or upgrade this network in decades, and much ofthe current rolling stock is outmoded and decrepit.

Theroot cause of this is the idiotic system employed by the UK, and almost nowhereelse, to run the railways - something called franchising.

Ina nutshell, this sees private operating companies "bid" for the rightsto run rail franchises so that they can siphon off millions of pounds in profitfor their shareholders, all the while being paid a subsidy by the government, whichamounted to almost $5 billion between 2007 and 2011.

Inthe UK, our current  leaders are obsessedwith privatization - throwing everything they can to the wolves of the freemarket.

Thepeople become inured  to it, sold the liethat this system is cheaper and more efficient.

Yetthe truth is, private companies ‑  perfectly adapted, as they are, formaking profit ‑ can only do so much good when it comes to providing servicesfrom which little money can be wrung out.

Columnistsfor the likes of Bloomberg have decried China's investment in its rail networkas unwise, given the heavy burden of debt it entails and the inherent difficultiesin turning a profit.

Trueenough, going by the information that is publicly available, it would seem thatState-owned China Railways Corporation only makes serious money from one lineit operates ‑ the massively popular Beijing-Shanghai route.

Butwhy should everything be boiled down to profitability?

Surely,this is the very reason for the existence of a public sector - to provide theservices that, otherwise, the market would not.

Unfortunately,in Britain, nationalization is still a dirty word - the UK's left-leaningLabour Party even felt forced to scrap their commitment to it in 1995, in orderto win a general election two years later.

Successiverightwing Conservative governments have regarded public ownership as anecessary evil, to be tolerated only until you can find some private interestthat will take it off your hands.

YetI would posit that when it comes to those public goods and services that areneeded, but not necessarily profitable - why would you leave it to the wolves?