Some here will not have noticed a column by Larry Elliott in the Guardian yesterday, in which he discussed the consequences of the 1960s Beeching report that led to the closure of thousands of miles of railway line. His argument can be summarised in this paragraph:
[P]erhaps the most baleful legacy of Beeching has been the way in which it has led to towns and villages — often in the most economically challenged parts of the country — becoming isolated. Beeching contributed to the UK's geographical divide between thriving big cities and struggling smaller towns. Without Beeching there might not have been a vote for Brexit.
Worth reading, I think.
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Hmmm…. Looks like a nice piece of speculation and I couldn’t comment for south Britain, but it wouldn’t fly in the Borders. This area was devastated by the Beeching axe, which ripped the infrastructure out of the greater part of southern Scotland – but you’ll have a hard job finding Brexiamaniacs here, despite all that. Superficially it might look a better thesis in the West Country, but there are plenty of other sources of local insularity for Cornwall and even for Devon. Perhaps the connection has more to do with the myopic economic ‘thinking’ which lay behind the Beeching type of social cost free accounting.
Anyway, why go looking for remote causes when the very real malign ones are daily paraded before us by ‘our’ largely post-truth Press – for whom the liar of Downing Street was such a cherished role model?
We should all know really about the faulty accounting that Beeching applied to his pruning exercise. He basically discounted any contributory income to the mainline and seemed to make each line he considered for closure a stand alone business unit with a narrow profit and loss accounting so that not even the advent of the cheaper to run diesel multiple units could save them.
The argument that some of the stations he closed were too far away from residential centres to be of any use could have been cured just by expanding public transport links to them.
And then there is a certain transport minister (Marple) who had an interest in road building/construction – the expansion of motorways for example.
People so often believe that the move to the car was a natural move from public transport.
It wasn’t – it was totally contrived by vested interests that look no better than those driving BREXIT today.
The social costs – from car pollution and economic isolation – will continue to be felt for a long time yet.
Beeching was undoubtably a change in course that altered the physical and economic landscape of Britain,
it was before my time but I’ve been aware of the event all my life, it seems a folly to me and must have seemed a folly to many adults around me as I grew up for it to have made it into my young awareness,
I think people in their day to day activities appreciated the ‘use-value’ of rail but economic thinking was obsessed with creating ‘exchange-value’
road transport and cars and trucks and all the associated service industries open up markets for generating exchange value, profits and goosing of GDP but you have to remove the use value of rail first to kill the alternative, to create a TINA situation,
Beeching really kicked the use value of rail in the nuts!
I don’t think you can lump the blame for Brexit on Beeching, it was a minor factor, blame Beeching for the current ‘car trap’ we are in that has much more serious ramifications for the environment and transitioning away from dependence on depleting fossil fuels reserves,
the Guardian is clutching at straws in the blame game for Brexit, it will clutch at any straw that enables it to draw attention away from the more central causes of Brexit because the Guardian has been, and still is, an ardent promoter of them,
Brexit is a backlash against the unadmitted consequences of globalisation here at home, Brexit is a cry of indignation from the wastelands created and then ignored by a move from industrialisation to financialisation,
a move from a maker society to a trader society, a move from workers to consumers,
Beeching pre dated Brexit, he may have helped plant one of the seeds of Brexit, I think the Guardian seriously needs to look at the germination and growth of Brexit during the New Labour and Blair years, their pushing ahead with globalisation, financialisation and the expansion of europe into the post soviet sattelite states, Blair took Thatchers TINA and relentlessly pushed it forward until people began to choke upon it,
do you remember Gordon Brown mumbling ‘bigot’ when that old lady asked him about ‘all those foreigners’?
I think that was the first green shoot of Brexit appearing that I can see in hindsight, it was left unaddressed and here we are today,
I did vote Remain, I do think Brexit is a very silly idea, as silly as Beeching even!
but I do understand where Brexit has come from, why people were pissed off enough to vote for it and also the blind, pigheaded stupidity of the establishment in ignoring all the warning signs of unease in the population and continuing their TINA obsession,
Brexit is the ultimate alternative that TINA refused to contemplate, TINA’s arch nemesis!
I blame TINA for Brexit,
I didn’t think I’d need to draw your attention to this. 🙂 Though I would have posted the link in the HS2 thread if it had been still open while we were all in ‘gricer’ mode.
The destruction of the rail network was another of those silly binary choices we made ….we shouldn’t have replaced the rail network with roads, we should have added the roads to what was already there. And yes, some of the rail network would have withered, inevitably.
Anybody fancy revelling in a little nostalgia ?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6OHD2uCpfU
Two points.
Firstly, In retrospect, what Beeching did turned out to be a great plan. We now have a network of cycle paths where the old train tracks ran, ready to be fully exploited by the boom in green transport when the GND appears.
Secondly, and more importantly, Brexit was entirely due to our governments pushing austerity on us, and blaming the EU / immigrants. Never loose sight of this .
We cant vote out past historical events. We cant vote out rich businesses who avoid tax by putting their money offshore. However, there are some who want to lay blame to our ills on things like this, we can’t control. But, the buck stops at our government, and they should be considered entirely responsible for the state of play.
I think you have rather missed the point of Larry’s article
Tony Weston says:
” We now have a network of cycle paths where the old train tracks ran,”
Sadly only some of the old lines have materialised as cycle tracks. Some became roads and some were just swallowed-up as (probably very) profitable development land. They make good cycle tracks because the inclines are gentle. Small compensation for a rail network system even so.
I agree: bikes are useful for the last mile or two in most cases, not for the long distance haul
I think the Marples Beeching connection is pretty well detailed in his Wiki entry
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Marples
“His involvement in the road construction business Marples Ridgway, of which he had been managing director, was one of repeated concern regarding possible conflict of interest. Marples appointed Richard Beeching to head British Railways…”
Worth reading the whole entry.
The bias was apparent, whatever the motive
“The bias was apparent, whatever the motive”
The motive is nearly always money.
A gong is nice, but that comes after.
I don’t think that anyone is clutching at straws here.
Compare the prices of accommodation in London that are near railway or tube stations to those that aren’t.
Look at Grantham and York since electrifcation of the ECML? There has been a lot of growth – not all of it good. But as part of the economic engine, railways have their place – even light rail.
There was a time when the railway worked all night. And most places had a goods yard. How much of those have been dug up over the years because they have been sold as assets to enrich shareholders? Why have too many of our stations been turned into subterranean hovels so that rent can be charged on the shops above? It’s as if the train travel bit comes last? I have a book with a lovely picture of Cannon Street station in London under its glass roof – I remember being there as a boy looking up at blue sky through that glass before the idiots moved in. All there is now is a dark void.
Never mind nostalgia – for environmental reasons, we need claim these attributes back. We need, efficient, fast and clean electric trains everywhere – that’s what we need, and the infrastructure for freight from national down to local (the RHA BTW needs putting in its place).
I recommend two books by E A Gibbins about the way in which the railways were ran down:
‘Blueprints for Bankruptcy’ (1993)
‘Square Deal Denied’ (1998)
The books go into a great amount of detail and are well researched as Gibbins focuses on Government policy and how it impacted on the railways. It certainly leaves you with an impression the Whitehall is indeed in the pockets of the road haulage lobbyists and motoring orgs. Even coastal shipping got a better deal.
Much of what is thought of as bad business practice by BR was actually because the Government made them do it. For example railways were expected to carry the most uneconomical loads – no questions asked.
But make no mistake, it was the Thatcher Government’s disastrous monetarist policies from 1979-1983 that caused such a lot of harm as British industrial output fell and therefore so did the trains (and BR revenue) that serviced it.
Thanks
Will try to get
Is one preferred?
Hi Richard
The second one – ‘Square Deal Denied’ goes further than the first – it’s a must have if you support the railways. People like Christian Wolmar and Adrian Vaughan have used it as source material because Gibbins references very diligently.
Thanks
@Pilgrim
“Much of what is thought of as bad business practice by BR was actually because the Government made them do it. For example railways were expected to carry the most uneconomical loads — no questions asked.”
You weren’t paying attention, Pilgrim. It was all the fault of the unions. The BVM (Blessed Virago Margaret) said so. 🙁
And that’s the historical narrative that underpins where we are today. I hadn’t previously thought of Beeching as being a sort of opening gambit – a preliminary skirmish in what was to follow. (Big skirmish mind you.)
The Beeching cuts, followed by privatisation were two colossal acts of vandalism, while the parallel policy of investing in roads and motor vehicle transportation was a gross mistake with immense unintended consequences – such as pollution and it’s associated deaths, congestion and contribution to global warming. Some of these consequences may not have been known at the time, in the way smoking was assumed to be healthy at one time.
And why is the bottom line always that rail should make a profit? I wonder if the road system makes a profit, when all the externalities (which are usually ignored) are taken into account?
I know that the GND Group have quite a bit to say about Transport, although much of it is fairly conventional Green thinking (I don’t mean in a disparaging way). Perhaps we need a Green Think Tank to have a wholistic review of and research into a truly integrated transport system (rail, road, water, sky, foot, bike), one that deals with the problems of those in “the back of beyond” – (eg miles up single track roads like on Ardnamurchan) as well as in urban centres and looking at the new opportunities for weather-proof electric cycles that could be used for most commuting, given adequate development funding. (e.g. https://www.podbike.com/en/)
I make clear, we really do not think we have all the answers