I was enjoying a perfectly adequate £42 breakfast muffin in the first-class lounge at Euston on Tuesday when I heard the distressing news. Andy Burnham, speaking at the launch of his Makerfield byelection campaign, had the audacity to suggest that politics “needs a new script.” His primary grievance? The £364 cost of an anytime return from Wigan North Western to London Euston.
He called the price “woeful.” He claimed people in the North cannot connect with the capital’s opportunities if they cannot afford the train. To which I must ask: has Mr. Burnham considered that keeping people from Wigan out of London is precisely what that £364 is paying for?
Burnham is threatening us with the ghastly specter of "rail re-nationalisation." He smugly points out that he "likes his buses," having taken them back under public control in Greater Manchester in 2023. But buses are a utilitarian necessity; the British rail network is a luxury financial instrument designed to extract maximum commuter despair and convert it into reliable quarterly dividends. You cannot simply hand that delicate alchemy back to the state. The market demands a sacrifice, and currently, that sacrifice is anyone trying to reach Euston before noon on a Tuesday.
To truly understand the mayor's complaints, I decided to do some boots-on-the-ground journalism. I purchased the very £364 anytime return to Wigan North Western he was whining about. Settling into my seat—which was only mildly damp and located in a carriage where the heating was permanently stuck on a setting best described as 'equatorial'—I realized what Burnham is missing.
You aren't paying for mere transit. You are paying for the profound, character-building suspense of not knowing if your train will suddenly terminate at Crewe because the operator has simply had enough. At one point, we sat stationary outside Warrington for forty-five minutes while an automated voice apologized for "a delay caused by the concept of autumn." You cannot get that level of avant-garde theater on a publicly owned railway. The private sector understands that affordable transit breeds entitlement.
If we lower the price of a standard ticket to something a normal human being can afford, passengers might start expecting the doors to open when we arrive at the platform, and frankly, that is not a service guarantee we are prepared to offer.
Burnham claims this is about "change to the economy, change to education, change to transport." But what he is actually proposing is the destruction of a great British institution: the right of a private holding company to charge you a week's wages to stand near a broken toilet for three hours.
If we nationalise the railways and drop the fare, anyone could just go to London. The capital would be flooded with people looking for "opportunities," rather than the current, carefully curated demographic of corporate consultants whose firms are willing to blind-expense the £364. Politics may indeed need a new script, as Burnham suggests. But I implore him not to touch the current one. It is working flawlessly for the people who wrote it.