When he was shadow chancellor and I was editing a Sunday newspaper, Gordon Brown came to our office to have lunch one day. The usual rules applied: nobody would take notes, nothing of the conversation would be quoted in the paper. All went well enough until the pudding, when the environment correspondent asked him about road pricing. What did he think of the idea as a way to cut car use and fund public transport?
"Oh," the shadow chancellor said, as though he stood teetering on the edge of an elephant trap, "you surely don't expect me to answer a question like that, do you?" Most politicians would have replied with a few bromides - tricky business, imperfect technology, more research needed - but Brown closed the subject by refusing to talk about it. John Major was prime minister and John Smith led the opposition; a general election was years away: and in any case, ours was a paper with Labour sympathies - we weren't going to stick in any knives. Suddenly we realised how cautious Brown was, how keen never to alienate "the British motorist", how limited his interest in public transport or environmental damage. Clearly, the last two weren't Brown themes.
In government it has been much the same. Around the time of our lunch, the Tory party was getting ready to privatise the railways. Labour committed itself to dismantling the privatisation and restoring a "publicly owned, publicly accountable railway". In 1995, Blair said privatisation was "absurd ... a hotchpotch of private companies linked together by a gigantic bureaucratic paperchase of contracts ... as the public learn more about the chaos and cost, their anger at this folly will grow". But by the time the election came around, no plan to renationalise was included in the manifesto. Brown reckoned it would cost too much. In any case, as he told a colleague, privatisation had twin benefits. It would "make the Tories unpopular and [a smile here] save us the trouble of having to do it". In power, Blair told an early cabinet meeting that railways were "not a priority".
They became one after a series of crashes, most notably Hatfield, and the collapse of Railtrack. Later, motorway congestion and the superficial greening of politics made them attractive as a future the government could more willingly embrace. Despite high fares and a confusing fare structure, passenger traffic continued to grow; last year more people travelled on British trains than at any time since demobilisation specials ran in 1946.
And yet when it comes to railway development, the government remains extraordinarily timid, almost abashed by the railways' success. There is no grand plan. The Department of Transport believes in business models and small, slow piecemeal improvements - a new junction here, platforms lengthened there. Outside London's Crossrail, no new stretch of railway is planned for England (the story is different in Scotland and Wales). Railways will "cater for" the changing patterns of travel; it won't attempt to create them.
The most striking example of government timidity is electrification. In the league table of European railways, Britain sits between Macedonia and the Czech Republic in the proportion of route miles it has electrified. At the end of 2005, it was 32.9%. Switzerland's proportion is 100%, France's 50.4. In other words, no other major European country believes, as Britain seemed to, that diesel locomotion is the way forward.
In terms of carbon emissions the benefits are clear-cut, no matter how the electricity is generated: London to Edinburgh by electric train has a carbon performance of around 45 grams of CO2 per passenger km compared with around 60 grams by diesel train or 210 grams by plane. In terms of efficiency, acceleration, maintenance and cleanliness, electric trains also win. The trouble is that the infrastructure of wires and posts is expensive to build: £400,000 for every km of single track, according to recent estimates in Modern Railways.
Cost and short-termism explain a lot of Britain's recent antipathy to electric railways, but the problem has deeper foundations. It could even be a paradigm of Britain's industrial and political history. The world's first electric locomotive, powered by zinc-acid batteries, was demonstrated on the Edinburgh & Glasgow Railway as early as 1842, but it was the German Werner von Siemens who made electric locomotion a practical possibility in the 1870s. Britain built a few novelty lines (one still survives, by Magnus Volk in Brighton) in the next decade. Private railway companies began to take electric traction seriously in the next century, with experimental schemes that used different forms of transmission, leaving a confusing legacy that still exists in the form of third rails (south of the Thames and on Merseyside) and overhead wires (everywhere else). Elsewhere in Europe, countries nationalised their railways - Italy in 1905, Germany in the 1920s, France in 1938 - and devised national strategies. In Britain, rivalrous private companies grew weaker. Only in the middle era of public ownership did Britain begin to electrify its main lines on any serious scale. And then in the 1990s the model of the free market returned, sweetened with heavy public subsidy but unfettered by strategic demands.
Eventually, in July last year, the government published its white paper, Delivering a Sustainable Railway. Electrification? "It would not be prudent to commit now to 'all-or-nothing' projects, such as network-wide electrification or a high-speed line, for which the longer-term benefits are currently uncertain and which do not reflect today's priorities". The transport secretary Ruth Kelly, gave evidence to the Commons' transport committee in January this year. Electrification? "It may well be the case that in the next few years I come back before this committee and say, 'I think electrification is the way to go'. I could not say that with confidence today ... I would not be able to make the value-for-money case."
The U-turn came last Friday. Kelly had noticed the price of oil. The events of recent weeks, she said, had "really brought home to me" how important it was "to complete the UK's transition to a low-carbon economy". Electrification? Yes indeed, it was time to phase out diesel engines.
The case for railway electrification has been argued over the past 10 years by many people inside the industry and out. Very few British politicians would get high marks for a similar foresight, particularly those in government.
I like to imagine a post-diluvian conference of historians high on a hill, portioning out the blame for sea-level rise and the turbulent weather. They have a long measuring stick. Ordinary, worldwide material ambition and human confusion take up several metres of its length, but here and there is a centimetre devoted to a particularly individual folly. George Bush has one of those. Much, much smaller, maybe only a millimetre but still just visible, is the Labour government's transport policy, 1997-2008 (or whenever).
