Want to get on a train? Time for philosophy

The underpinning philosophies of how to govern are not abstract or obtuse. Rather they are the battlefields on which the future of public service will be fought.

If there's one thing we all know it's that fighting abstract fights about philosophy might be fun for some (boring for others) but it's fundamentally an indulgent waste of time when it comes to getting real things done. So let me pose a question – why then do the powerful spend so much time and money on philosophy?

It's almost like those of us who know it is a waste of time are... well, wrong. Or at least it seems like people with power and money have much more tolerance for it than we do. Why might that be? Might the abstract philosophies that underpin politics and policy actually really matter? Might winning over the intellectual space actually help you win the game?

Yes, yes it does is the simple answer. Philosophies are not abstract, they are the logical driving force behind action. And if a philosophy points right, it is very hard to make something governed by that philosophy point left.

Let's look at a specific example to show what I mean, and to give a shape to the kind of fightback we need to pursue. It was revealed in Neil McKay's story on who owns trains which appeared in last weekend's Herald. On the face of it, this is a simple revelation of a big failure in policy-making. But on more reflection I'd argue that policy isn't what failed here.

Here are the basics; when you buy a train ticket about a quarter of the money you just paid went to a train rental business. This is a very expensive charge for access to an old fleet of trains the capital cost of which would have been paid off ages ago. It would save millions of pounds a year if the train company bought rather than rented their own trains.

This is because of the structure of the rail network and it's multiple, nonsensical moving parts. When the railways were privatised the rails, trains, operators, regulators and more were all split up into different functions and hived off to a bunch of companies in an attempt to make it all look like it was a genuine free market in trains.

It was no such thing. In fact would it surprise you to discover that one of the main business opportunities in the privatised train industry had nothing to do with running trains and much more to do with yet another financial scam where gaming the system of capital cost past-through lets financial companies milk subsidies by deliberately overcharging for unnecessarily high-specced infrastructure?

I suspect it won't surprise you one little bit. And as you know this whole clunky system has already fallen over multiple times each of which has needed major public interventions. You will also be aware that we don't exactly have well-run railways if you measure it by how often trains are on time. You should certainly be aware that we are paying for basically the most expensive tickets in Europe.

Why are the tickets so expensive? Because the system is set up as a system of economic termites. I want again to bring your attention to this concept. Economic termites wheedle their way into the gaps between actual productive activity and extract profit not to improve anything but only to take money that doesn't need to be spent.

These termites get in between passengers and train operators where they then hold the trains to ransom in what is by no manner of means at all an actually free market. It is just a profit-making scam. They run along tracks financed by a sort of PFI deal which is where the complicated investment scam I mentioned above is enacted.

So between the passenger and the train is an entity taking money away for no real reason and then between the train and the tracks is another entity taking money away for no real reason. And of course the train operators themselves aren't doing this for the public good so they take a profit share too. That's three termites between the customer and their destination – just to get a train.

There is another corrosive aspect to all of this mess. It is best thought of as the 'British shrug'. We should be up in arms about this, protesting at every railway station. Except certainly over the privatised era we have just been habituated to the idea that 'this is what it is like'. Yet then we go on holiday and see someone else run a railway and we start to wonder what is going on in Britain.

“If they can corrupt the source code via which government works then they don’t have to rig every policy, policies rig themselves”

So rolling back to the start – why isn't this a failure of policy? Well, it is a failure in policy, but that is the symptom not the cause. The cause is the philosophy of outsourcing. In fact it is more like a theology because it relies on theory not to explain data but to explain away the data.

All of this exists because there is a fundamental belief that the private sector is efficient and the public sector isn't. This is because of the 'discipline of the market' – train companies have to live with the realities of profit and loss, income and expenditure. The 'pure' economic reality in which they work makes them more efficient. Is the theory.

The public sector, on the other hand, is flabby and wasteful and because there is no competition it simply can't be efficient. That philosophy was brought in by Thatcher and it is stronger than granite inside Scotland's public sector. People come out in a sweat if someone says 'direct provision'. The idea of owning a train petrifies them – the idea of paying through the nose to rent an old train doesn't.

This philosophy is measurably untrue in virtually every possible way. Private health is more expensive than public health. Monopolies are more expensive for customers than collective provision. Profit does not make business more efficient, genuine competition on a day to day basis from equals who have equal access to a market makes businesses more efficient.

Fragmentation does not improve performance but reduces it. And losing democratic control does not make things work better for citizens but only for producers. None of this is an opinion; you can measure all of this.

So if this was to be set up according to the philosophy then if a Rosco (the company that rents out the trains) charges too much on Monday, a train operator should be able to swap to a different supplier on Tuesday. That would bring prices down. And anyone would need to be able to start a Rosco so that it isn't a cartel.

The whole thing would need to be internally integrated as a single system but with at least half a dozen options for consumers every time. So 'no logo' trains would have to roll up and you could then buy a ticket from one of six or eight companies all trying to undercut each other, all for the same train.

This is totally, wholly impossible. None of that can be done. It is the only way the philosophy could be made to make sense, but it can't be made to make sense because it doesn't make sense and is based on distortions and fantasies.

Or, more importantly, the philosophy is based on its own disappearance. It is important that you don't see it as one philosophy among a wide range of possible philosophies but instead you see it as 'true' – universal, eternal, a description of our reality.

But try and get a politician to adopt a different governing philosophy and they start panicking. They complain about the giant limitations for their constituents of a PFI school the community can't access, but they could easily do something about this and they don't. They will not challenge the system, even if they don't like how the system works.

That is why it is so, so valuable to the powerful if they can come up with mad-cap explanations of why things that look clearly wrong aren't wrong at all. If they can corrupt the source code via which government works then they don't have to rig every policy, policies rig themselves. That's why this is more a failure of philosophy than policy.

The alternative is simple; we need to fight for competing philosophies. In Sorted we set a lot of these out in a chapter entitled 'Lights to Guide Us'. Social reformers would do well to learn to focus not only on the minutiae (important as that is) but on the fundamental ideologies of government. We lost the fight for those ideologies 40 years ago and we've been content to stay beaten.

Outsourcing does not create efficiency; instead the public sector should cut out every single middleman between citizen and service. Ruthlessly. That is an easily-articulable philosophy that is powerful, that the public will understand and support, that is very difficult to argue against and that changes government forever.

No, fighting battles over philosophy is not an indulgence. Right now it is right up at the top of the list of necessities.