Railways signal the state of a nation. Fast, clean, cheap, punctual trains make a country look well run: Mussolini and Hitler knew the potency of “making the trains run on time”. Any prime minister who puts Chris Grayling in charge, an ideological obsessive who destroys all he touches, is tone deaf to the national pulse.

This week’s train fare rise announcement was political folly on a grand scale, after June’s train timetable fiasco left tens of thousands of trains cancelled. Fares have risen at twice the pace of wages, up 42%, pay up just 18% since 2008, with driver shortages, short trains and customers short-changed by the some of the most expensive fares in the world. A Peterborough to Kings Cross season ticket costs £6,540 a year while in Germany a BahnCard 100 buys a year’s travel anywhere for £3,840. Meanwhile, fuel tax has been frozen for seven years.

To make the point, one protester bought a car, taxed it, filled it with petrol and travelled from Bristol to Crouch End for less than the £218 full train fare, with £11 left over for lunch. People are spending one-fifth and more of their disposable incomes on season tickets, so these fare rises up-end super-fine calculations on the lower cost of a mortgage balanced against rising train fares with every mile travelled from centres of work. The missing ingredient is a reminder to business, forever whingeing about taxes, that unless the state carries their staff to work, low pay doesn’t cover fares. Dishonestly, the government uses the higher retail prices index to raise regulated fares and student loans, an index the Treasury and Bank of England declare “flawed” and “useless”, yet conveniently choose the lower consumer price index to keep pension and benefit rises low.

Two-thirds of voters want the railways to be renationalised, as Labour proposes, with only 19% opposed. The nonsense of rail privatisation is well-understood: the taxpayer pumps in £3.5bn subsidy, the many companies take out millions in profit; each has their own well-oiled board and chief executive, these rolling stock companies rolling in profits. Whatever happened to that pledge to parliament made by transport secretary John MacGregor in 1993: “I see no reason why fares should increase faster under the new system than they do under the present nationalised industry structure. In many cases, they will be more flexible and will be reduced.”

Companies can spend £60m a year just to bid for franchises. That’s an administrative madness that far outstrips the old rightwing complaint against British Rail that it was a bureaucratic monolith synonymous with state-owned, shabby, producer-captured sluggishness. John Major may be a revered anti-Brexit hero now, but it was his personal ideological fixation that dreamed up dashing liveries for different companies, which he imagined steaming away in hot competition embodying the free market. But there’s precious little competition – instead passengers are stuck with empty choices.

When profits are less than hoped, companies simply bail out, the east coast franchise has collapsed three times and been rescued by the state. Under public ownership, satisfaction rose to 91% and it yielded £225m a year profit to the state. That’s the embarrassment that had George Osborne dashing to reprivatise it in 2015, only for it to collapse again.

Meanwhile Network Rail scavenges for cash with a £1.5bn sell-off of railway arches harbouring 4,455 age-old businesses alongside new start-ups, going against every ethos of a state-owned company.

Is nationalisation a magic bullet train? There are risks: will the Treasury invest enough or, as before, keep cutting back on capital? Will the unions hold more sway than passengers? The same basic dilemmas will remain – how much should the state spend on a minority mode of transport, when cars and buses take most people to work? Council funding for buses has halved since 2010, and 3,000 vital services have been cut. Three-quarters of goods travel by road, not rail.

Can Labour for the first time offer a genuinely integrated transport system where at last everything links up? Imagining joined-up trains, buses, trams and bike-routes has been beyond all transport secretaries. Right now, no one is in charge, and that goes for virtually every department in Theresa May’s paralysed, swinging-in-the-wind regime.

Trains do signify the fitness of a government. If an incoming Labour government concentrates hard on making trains run on time at fair fares, that would be a potent signal of all-round efficiency worth investing in heavily. But what perplexes me is the passivity of train-travelling commuters, among the most well-heeled, empowered of citizens. Yet apart from a minor kicking down of a gate in St Albans during the worst of the timetabling disaster, they fail to rebel. Along Southern’s lines, passing through nothing but top Tory MPs’ constituencies, passengers tolerate years of strikes and disruption, with more to come. Why aren’t they taking direct action, voting out their MPs and super-gluing ticket barriers? Ah, I forgot. The private companies get paid regardless of ticket income: only the state loses if people refuse to pay, another brilliant bit of contracting in these failed franchises.

• Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist