Smiling Burnham vows to shake the magic money tree

Natasha Irons, the Labour MP for Croydon East, said she was “proud” that the government was “putting passengers before profit” by bringing railway companies into public ownership.

- JOHN RENTOUL

It was a revealing moment in Prime Minister’s Questions this week, because it was so unremarkable. A Labour MP sloganised meaninglessly about “profit” being the enemy of customer service and no one noticed. Keir Starmer replied that he too was “proud” that her constituents are travelling on rail services that are now “back in public ownership”, and no one batted an eyelid.

The prime minister assumed that everyone agrees that public ownership is better than a competitive market because that is what the voters think, according to superficial opinion polls.

Worse, he boasted that some of Irons’s constituents were “benefiting from the first freeze in rail fares for 30 years”. If he had said that rail travellers, who tend to be better off, are being subsidised even more by taxpayers, who are on average poorer than they are, the cheers of Labour MPs might have been less noisy.

But no, the surrender to magic money-tree economics is so complete that it passed without comment. No one rose to demand, “Did the old Clause IV die in vain?” No one asked if Tony Blair had gone to all that trouble to expunge the commitment to the “common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange” from Labour’s constitution for nothing.