The privatizers claimed that competition would lift standards of service, put the needs of the consumer first, reduce the burden on the taxpayer, rid the system of inefficiencies and drive down prices. On all scores, the privatization of Britain’s railways is an embarrassment. Look no further than the current dispute on Southern to see how dysfunctional the privatized system is.

Govia is contracted to run the Southern franchise — and is paid about £1 billion (or $1.24 billion), a year by the government to do so. In return, revenue from ticket sales goes directly back to the government. Yet if train services are delayed or canceled, it is the government — or rather, the taxpayer — that refunds the bitter commuters. The company itself therefore has no incentive to settle with the unions; arguably, it is being paid by the Tory government to keep up the fight. Yet the transport secretary, Chris Grayling, pretends to have no hand in the matter, saying he cannot “wave a wand” to resolve the dispute.

Little wonder that a recent poll found that 58 percent of Britons believe rail privatization is a complete or partial failure, with only 13 percent describing it as a partial or complete success. A 2013 report commissioned by unions, “The Great Train Robbery,” found that British taxpayers spend far more on the privatized system than they did on the old nationalized model. Part of the reason for that is that the government subsidies built into the system in large part end up as dividends for shareholders, rather than being invested in upgrades.

Would public ownership achieve better results? As the right-leaning Daily Telegraph recently pointed out, when a troubled private rail franchise run by a company named Connex was taken into public ownership from 2003 to 2006, performance, punctuality and passenger satisfaction all improved. Similarly, after the East Coast network was renationalized in 2009, it became the most efficient rail franchise in Britain, needing less public subsidy than any other and returning hundreds of millions of pounds in revenues to the public purse. To complete the experiment, when it was again privatized in 2015, ticket prices on some journeys doubled and public satisfaction declined.

Not that public ownership has been banished from Britain’s railways — but only other European governments are free to buy up Britain’s rail networks. Foreign governments running British railway networks include France, Germany and the Netherlands. The important difference, of course, is that foreign state-owned companies are not accountable to British passengers (as a nationalized company is to British voters).

Considering all the humiliating failures, why have successive governments — both Conservative and New Labour — continued to pursue privatization with such unbending zeal? In short, to undermine organized labor. Britain has the “the most restrictive union laws in the Western world,” Tony Blair complained, shortly before winning election in 1997. And Mr. Grayling has made his antipathy to unions very clear — blaming them for the dispute, accusing the opposition leader of fomenting strike action, and even hinting at legislation to outlaw strikes.