This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

What on earth is the point of the Labour Party if it cannot even oppose the mad disaster of railway privatisation? Well, there was a feeble flicker of hope at the weekend that some of its would-be MPs have realised this, and we should all be glad.

For, once Labour actively opposes this costly, tragicomic failure, everyone else will have to recognise the truth and we can go back to good old British Railways.

Like comprehensive schools, EU membership, windmill electricity, equality and diversity and multiculturalism, privatisation was imposed on us against our will by inmates of the political asylum.

Politics is a mild form of mental illness in all cases, but in recent years it has become more virulent. Much of this is the fault of the think-tanks in which political careerists can shelter from reality.

Alas, most modern politicians have no ideas or convictions of their own and, needing to do things they can be remembered for, they are easy victims of these gabbling charlatans.

The privatisation of the railways was done against the advice of everyone who knew anything about the subject. Quite predictably, it cost far more in subsidies than the old nationalised system. In a few years it destroyed more than a century of experience in safety and track maintenance. It finished off most of what was left of our train manufacture.

All the claims made for it are bogus. Passenger numbers increased not because of privatisation but in spite of it, as more and more people were forced by unhinged house prices to commute vast distances to work – and could only do so by train.

Punctuality has improved because the timetables were padded to avoid penalties from the ‘Passenger’s Charter’. The trains take just as long if not longer, and break down just as much, but are not officially late.

For many years, investment in such things as electrification almost ceased. The trains I ride daily are 1970s antiques that ought to be in the National Railway Museum at York.

It is bitterly funny to record that Network Rail, successor to the disastrous Railtrack (or ‘Failcrack’ as it should have been called), is now officially classified as a ‘government body’ and its debts of £30 billion are part of the national debt. Meanwhile, one of the most successful ‘privatised’ train companies, East Coast, is currently publicly owned, and many of the others are owned by foreign state railways. And all of them are being subsidised by you and me, thanks to artificially low track charges levied by Network Rail.

The truth will out. It was always better for the railways to be nationalised and subsidised. What a pity it took us so many years, so many needless deaths and so many billions of wasted money to find out what we already knew. Bring back BR.

Gunned down - by 'good' Ukrainians

The absurd bias of most coverage of the Ukraine crisis is best shown in what it does not say. It never mentions that the USA and EU started the whole thing by trying to bribe Ukraine into joining their gang, and by sending leading politicians to egg on the Kiev mob.

And it never gives a fair deal to the Russian case.

Here’s proof, if you like. Yulia Izotova, a 21-year-old nurse, was shot dead while carrying sandwiches to a checkpoint manned by Russian separatists in Kramatorsk. All the evidence suggests her killer was a Ukrainian soldier.

Had it been the other way round, you would have seen a lot of her pretty face, and of her bitter funeral. But you haven’t.

The same is true of the Russians, at least 40 of them, burned to death in Odessa after being besieged in a blazing building by a pro-Kiev mob. Imagine the headlines and the coverage if it had been pro-Putin marchers doing the besieging.

But this horrible event is barely mentioned in the West. You’re being manipulated by people who want your support for a stupid war. Resist.

Why not have an A-level in Russell Brand studies? Mr Brand is the true face of modern British thought and politics. His language – at the same time florid, pompous and crude – is pretty much the way most people under 35 argue these days.

Why carry on pretending that we are the land of Shakespeare and Milton, when we are really the nation of Sid Vicious, Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross?

Free trade will make slaves of us all

I have stopped believing in free trade. I have been told for decades now that it is good for everyone, that we cannot protect our own jobs or industries or even our borders.

This may have been true when we were the workshop of the world, flooding the planet with the products of our ingenious new industries.

But it’s not true now. If we cannot keep out goods produced by sweatshops in Canton (and I have seen these awful places) how long before we, too, are reduced to the same living standards? We cannot afford our present welfare state, and, when it collapses, how exactly do you think your sons and daughters are going to live? By eating their first-class social science degrees?

When I was a child there was almost nothing we used that wasn’t made here, from the cutlery in the kitchen and the tools in the shed to my third-hand bicycle, not to mention all our food (apart from the New Zealand lamb and butter) and clothes. When we spent our money, most of it went to our fellow Britons. Then, in a few years, it all went. I still recall my father’s shame and misery at even contemplating buying a foreign car. He gave in in the end, but never really got used to it. The ironmongers still tried to sell solid British tools, but they were ludicrously costly compared to the foreign imports beside them.

Why was the old arrangement wrong, and the new one better? Is protection really so wicked? No doubt it would make life more expensive, but for a good purpose. As people who barely make anything but buy a great deal, can we expect our current standard of living to last? We are visibly becoming a land of cheap labour, debt, insecure jobs and overcrowded housing.

Oddly enough, we have managed to preserve two major industries – defence and pharmaceuticals. Both have been saved – so far – by covert protection. Nobody will admit it, but the Ministry of Defence and the NHS have kept them going. Now even that is coming to an end, what is left?

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