A litmus test for state control.

Labour’s rail nationalisation dream faces a looming taxpayer crisis

Britain's railways are creaking at the seams. The rail regulator ruled last year that a 7am Avanti service from Manchester to London should run empty to guarantee the train's availability in the capital and ease overcrowding.

It led to the bizarre scene of a 600-seat "ghost train" departing the platform of Manchester Piccadilly with a full complement of staff – while hundreds of stranded passengers looked on in despair.

Heidi Alexander, the Transport Secretary, last month hailed the state-backed takeover of Govia Thameslink, Britain's largest train operator, as a "defining moment" for the nation's railways.

The takeover forms part of Sir Keir Starmer's flagship transport policy to nationalise the railways, slowly taking back franchises from private companies one by one...

With politicians of all stripes, including the possible future prime minister, Andy Burnham, hailing greater public ownership of key industries, the battle to fix the railways is set to become a litmus test for state control.

That risks quashing a wider nationalisation drive that, under a new Labour leader, might extend to water firms, energy supply networks, Royal Mail and broadband providers. Nothing less than the future of the British economy could be at stake.

This litmus test for state control is also a litmus test for what must be the most stupidly malicious government since... well... since the last one I suppose.

Yet when we consider the remarkable stupidity of successive governments, normal folk must have an equally remarkable capacity for just plodding on. Ordinary people doing what they do keeps the show on the road, not climbers of the greasy pole.

But we already knew that.