Buses are about redistribution, productivity and a greener future

Labour’s policy for buses is a key part of reversing the impact of neoliberalism on transport since the 1980s. It is redistributive: it helps those who cannot afford to drive to work. Nearly half of all bus journeys are taken by those who have no car, and two thirds of those who travel on buses have an annual income below £25,000 per annum. But it is also a brave policy. By far the most popular mode of transport is by car (or van), and the policy will be portrayed by opponents as putting road building at risk. .

The money recently promised by Labour will mainly go to undoing another impact of austerity. Outside London fares on commercial routes are set by bus operators. Local authorities can provide subsidies for routes that are socially important but not commercially viable. Local authority-supported services outside London have halved in vehicle mileage since 2009 as austerity has squeezed local authority budgets.

But Labour also plan to change the way buses are run outside London. Bus operation was privatised by Mrs Thatcher in 1986. Yet privatisation has in most cases failed to bring the benefits of competition. Largely as a result of a long-term process of consolidation through merger and acquisition, the UK bus industry is highly concentrated with three businesses (Arriva, FirstGroup, and Stagecoach) dominating the sector. Head-to-head competition between operators is uncommon, producing what is effectively a monopoly.

The market failure in this case may be the ability of a large bus operator to stifle any competition by temporarily cutting prices or increasing frequency. That makes the routes unprofitable for a time for the large bus company, but it is also unprofitable for the new entrant. As the financial resources available to the big company are much greater, they have the ability to kill off or take over any competition.There is no regulator preventing this kind of unfair competition.

With new entry unlikely to happen because of the possibility of such threats, the large bus companies can do what every unregulated monopoly does: raise fares and reduce services. That is good for profits and dividends, but bad for passengers. The large bus companies make good profits, and the passenger gets a more expensive or less frequent service. Since 2009, for example, the average price of riding a bus has increased in real terms by over 15%, while the cost of using a car in real terms has hardly changed.

There is a vicious circle here. The cost of running a bus is largely independent of how many people use it, so if usage declines firms put prices up, which in turn discourages passengers. But one important area has seen bus use rise rather than decline, and that is London.

The system in London is rather different from the rest of the country. Contrary to common belief, Transport for London does not own its buses. What it can do that local authorities elsewhere cannot is set routes and fares, with private companies bidding to run each route. That avoids the high fares that come from monopoly, and it also makes it easy to establish a common ticketing system which is absent in places like Manchester. The system used in many European countries for their bus services is similar to London. An important advantage London has is that there is effective competition between bus companies to bid for tenders on routes, which helps keep costs down and maintains efficiency that might be lost in a completely nationalised system.

The success of London compared to most other areas of the country suggests the neoliberal ideal of a bus system free from government ‘interference’ does not work, and local control over routes and fares can provide a better service. It is a classic example of where economics, which recognises the social costs of monopoly, beats a neoliberal ideology that is often blind to the dangers of monopoly. This is why Labour also plan to encourage areas outside London to re-regulate bus services, and support the creation of municipal bus companies that are publicly run.

While a comparison between London and elsewhere shows the dangers of private monopolies charging too high a price for services, is there not a danger that if local government can set fares it will tend to set fares too low? I don’t think this is likely to be a major issue because of two other problems (what economists call externalities) with a profit-based bus service. If people use many cars rather than a single bus this increases congestion and pollution.

Anyone familiar with large towns and cities during rush hour will know what a nightmare congestion can be. Buses can reduce congestion by persuading people not to use their cars. Basic economics tells us that the congestion externality justifies subsidising bus travel or taxing cars. Exactly the same point applies to CO2 emissions and pollution. In this respect underpricing bus travel can be advantageous.

Unfortunately the experience of UK cities suggest that cheap fares alone may not be enough to prevent congestion. In addition congestion outside London may be having a serious impact on the productivity of our cities, as well as increasing pollution and CO2 emissions.

Tom Forth writes about a recent study that starts with a puzzle. In many countries large cities tend to be more productive than small cities, and economists explain this by talking about agglomeration effects. However this pattern does not seem to be true for the UK if you exclude London. Another way of putting the same point is that UK cities outside London are not as productive as they should be.

The study then looks at transport times to the centre of Birmingham, where the transport system is mainly based on buses. At peak times, when congestion is high, bus journey times into work can double on bad days, and anyone using a bus route has to plan for bad days. So if we think about the effective size of Birmingham in terms of a reasonable time to get to the centre, the city shrinks substantially.

This study shows that as long as cars are free to come into the centre those travelling on buses also suffer. Birmingham is using this study to target investment in bus lanes, which provides a partial answer. Park and ride schemes can help too. Another approach is to again follow London and introduce a congestion charge, but this will only be politically feasible if alternatives are easy, cheap, frequent and reliable.

If we look at cities in France, the big difference with UK cities is metros. Lyon has 4 lines, while Lille and Marseille have two lines each. Birmingham and Manchester have none. Last week I visited the French city of Rennes, population 215,000, that has one metro and is building another. Manchester has a good tram network similar to Lyon, but Birmingham has just one and Leeds none (compared to three in Marseille and two in Lille).

In short, cities outside London lack the transport infrastructure that can make them work productively, but also in a way that reduces CO2 emissions and other forms of pollution. One difference with France is how money is provided. In France every city larger than 100,000 people has a ten-year transport plan, with significant national investment in five-year allocations with ten-year strategies. In the UK cities are good at the strategies and visions but cannot secure funding to realise them.

Once you have well functioning cities you need to provide easy connections to nearby towns. Towns flourish when they are well connected to dynamic cities. Many will argue that this kind of local investment is money better spent than HS2, but I don’t think we should think of these as alternatives. Cities that link quickly to other cities are likely to be more productive, and France’s TGV network puts the UK to shame. The UK has underinvested in non-road transport infrastructure outside London for decades, and we need to make up for this quickly to create a more prosperous and greener future.

Why Brexit is a neoliberal project

Neoliberalism is generally associated with extolling the market, encouraging globalisation and generally being on the side of business. As Brexit will reduce the size of markets available to UK firms and therefore reverse globalisation in the UK, and is definitely not what most of UK business wants, how can it be neoliberal?

A good place to start is to go back to a discussion of what free trade means. Most people, and certainly most economists, would think that free trade means free to trade. Following that definition, harmonising regulations across countries which enables firms to trade much more easily in many countries is increasing free trade. The ideal is one single market, which is what the EU has achieved for goods and many services.

Many neoliberals would think that way. But others would see free trade as meaning free from any kind of state interference. The Single Market, with a court to judge whether its rules and regulations have been broken or not, does not sound free in that sense. Their ideal becomes trade that is as free as possible from any kind of state regulation. They do not want harmonised regulations, but the minimum amount of regulations.

If seeing free trade as meaning free from regulations on trade seems strange, it shouldn’t. If you look at how many neoliberals use the term free market that is exactly the what they often mean. If someone says that executive pay is determined by the free market, they do not mean a market free from what economists would call imperfections but just free from government interference. Unlike ordoliberals, neoliberals of this type would call a market with a monopoly producer free but a market where competition policy broke up monopolies as suffering from state meddling.

I had original thought that the Global Britain idea that Brexiters go on about was pure deflection from the awkward fact that Brexit would restrict trade. I think I was being unfair. Being true neoliberals Brexiters do not want to destroy trade, but trade has to be as regulation free as possible. Far better, therefore, for the UK to trade with the US or emerging markets that had weaker regulations than with the Single Market. The problem with the Single Market, from the Brexiters viewpoint, is that it locks in strong regulations of various kinds.

This helps explain why so many Brexiters also appear to be strong neoliberals. Brexit is like striving for a kind of neoliberal utopia, in contrast to other neoliberals like Osborne and Cameron who were prepared to compromise over regulations for the benefit of access to a bigger market. And just as neoliberals have no worries about tricking the public to vote for their utopia by pretending it was something very different, they also have little time for firms that cannot understand that what the Brexiters are doing will ultimately be for their own good. Politics as marketing, better described as deceiving of the public, is a common neoliberal trait.

The Brexiters are just one more group inspired by their own vision of neoliberal Nirvana. While Osborne and Cameron were prepared to settle for a small state, the Brexiters want that along with as few regulations as possible. Both obtain their vision deceitfully, and are prepared to inflict untold damage on the economy to get what they want. Like all good Leninists they believe that in the end (for Rees-Mogg 50 years) it will all be worth it. Which means if they get their way we will endure half a century of economic damage only to demonstrate their vision was just one more neoliberal fantasy, 

Trump and Brexit

As Trump makes clear, the UK can choose US rules or EU rules. Brexit is about having no say in either.

Of course every Leave voter is an individual with their own motives. But if you had to broadly characterise the two big issues that gave the Leave side victory in 2016, it was fears about immigration and a wish for greater sovereignty. Both were based on lies.

Immigration

You would not know it from the media, but people in the UK have been developing a more favourable view of immigration over the last six years. Here is a table from the latest National Centre for Social Research Social Attitudes survey on Europe.

In 2017, for those who expressed an opinion one way or the other, nearly three quarters thought immigration had a positive impact on the economy, and 65% thought immigrants enriched our culture.

Given this trend in attitudes, how did we vote to Leave? I keep going back this poll on EU immigration published in June 2016 which I wrote about shortly after it came out.

You can see it is consistent with the numbers above: people on balance think EU immigration is good for the economy and for British culture, and even for themselves personally. So why would they want to reduce EU immigration? Because they overwhelmingly thought EU immigration was bad for the NHS (and by implication all public services).

This, after all, is the line that Conservative and even some Labour politicians have consistently pushed, as have parts of the media with no comeback from most broadcasters. Before the referendum there were few stories about EU doctors and nurses, but plenty about migrants using the NHS. This concern was emphasised by the Leave campaign with the combination of the £350 million more for NHS claim and the prospect of being ‘overrun’ by Turkish immigrants.

The only problem with these claims that immigration reduces access to public services is that we know, with almost certainty, that the opposite is true: immigration creates net additional resources for public services. This is not complicated: they pay more in taxes than they take out because they tend to be of working age. But the myth that politicians and the media promulgate is that immigrants are somehow the reason access to public services has become more difficult, and they do this in large party to cover up the impact of austerity.

There was a final issue during the referendum that may have encouraged people to vote Leave. Even if they were positive about the EU immigrants that were already here, it just seemed sensible that the government should control their number. After all the government had set a target for net migration, and were having great difficulty meeting it. Yet the media never talked about the positive aspect of freedom of movement - the ability of UK citizens to live and work anywhere in the EU - and how that would end if we left.

Sovereignty and trade

I still talk to Leavers on both right or left who are convinced that the EU has taken away major elements of the UK’s sovereignty. One talked about “accountable democracy, sovereignty, independence, autonomy and freedom”. Yet when I ask for specific instances of a law or somesuch where the EU has compromised all these things, answer comes there none. There is a simply reason for this, beyond the propaganda, and that is that the EU is about harmonising regulations, and this harmonisation has brought benefits rather than pain to UK citizens.

International trade involves a form of cooperation with other countries, and international trade is good for both sides because it allows more efficient production as well as consumption of a greater variety of goods. The more we cooperate on rules and regulations, the more trade will happen. This harmonisation of regulations is like marriage: each side loses a degree of individual autonomy but we gain much more in return.

The thing about regulations governing networks of trade is that there cannot be too many of them, just as there cannot be many operating systems for computers. The whole point about harmonising regulations is to reduce their number of regulations, so firms do not have to produce lots of different goods which differ only in the different national regulations they meet. Which means that, if the UK wants to really benefit from the gains to trade, it has to choose one standard to match UK regulations with. And given existing patterns of trade, the UK only really has a choice between two: the EU and North America (NAFTA). Neither is likely to abandon their regulations in favour of what the UK may happen to do. (Equally third countries will never choose to harmonise on UK regulations rather than EU or the US.)

Translate this into Brexit, taking back control is like divorce, except in this case divorce from a partner you are still happy to be with (we happily trade with). To be honest, however, I’m not sure many Leave voters needed convincing of all this. As this poll shows, only 22% of Leave voters thought we would lose full access to the single market. Instead they believed the propaganda they were fed, that somehow their lives were being influenced in a negative way by the EU, and that they would therefore be better off after Brexit

Brexiters and Trump

While most voters were not very interested in regulations, many Brexiters certainly were. Most Brexiters are not very interested in immigration, but are interested in removing us from EU regulations and adopting much looser US standards. Of course they talked about ‘global Britain’, but it never made sense for the UK to set its own regulations for trade independently of both the EU and US. What they wanted was to get rid of EU regulations on labour or the environment which did not fit into their ideological framework.

To say, as I did here, that the Brexiters hijacked the EU negotiations, to make them about their own concerns rather than the people who voted, is not quite right. I think it is another example of deceit: getting what they want indirectly because what they want is not in itself popular. EU labour and environmental regulations are popular with most people. So the Brexiters could only achieve their goals through deceiving Leavers, and once more through our partisan or pathetic media they succeeded. After all, the first significant deceit, which was reducing the size of the state by making a fuss about the deficit, had been a big political success.

Normal US politics would want none of this. The US traditionally values the UK as part of the EU, and a jumping off point for their own corporations. Trump is of course not a normal POTUS. He is part of a right wing plutocratic elite that has captured the Republican party, and a good part of the Conservative party. Their aim is to spread his kind of authoritarian right wing politics as far as they can. Trump’s retweeting of Britain First islamophobic materials was no accident. One of his ambassadors has lobbied on behalf of former English Defence League leader Tommy Robinson!

I remember writing sometime back that Trump’s election was a big blow to Brexit. I thought, perhaps naively, that at least some Brexiters would think twice before becoming cheerleaders for Trump. I thought some might be concerned that far from doing trade deals, they would be concerned that Trump seemed more interested in destroying trade by placing tariffs on imported goods. If any have showed any concern I have not noticed. It seems instead that the Brexiters, along with the right wing press, really are the Republican party in the UK.

Theresa May

Stage one of the Brexit endgame that we saw less than two weeks ago was Theresa May at last standing up to the Brexiters in her party. I think she could and should have done this from the very beginning. That she didn’t do so reflects naivety about Brexit rather than strategy on her part. There are many clues that this was so, some of which are spelt out by Jonathan Lis here: getting rid of Sir Ivan Rogers was a huge unforced error that conclusively shows that she and her immediate advisors did not understand the task they had taken on. But it would be suicide for her to turn back from her new path now..

Trump’s attacks on her are another sign of how important her Chequers document is. Of course it is not a plan the EU can accept, but it represents her choice to finally stop the Brexiters turning Brexit into their ideological, Republican orientated plaything. She must know that her new opponents will not be appeased, and do not do compromise. I hope that Trump’s humiliation of her will help her see that global Britain was always a myth, and that the UK has to choose the EU rather than the US. She will need resolve as she is forced to compromise further to get a deal, although she will try to push at least some of that into transition.

Perhaps I am wrong about the final situation being BINO plus face saving for the UK: perhaps the EU will offer serious concessions for the first time in these negotiations. But it is foolish to believe that these concessions will in any way be advantageous to the UK, and somehow make Brexit worthwhile. What gain is there to be outside the single market for services, when exports of products from financial and creative industries to the EU is one of the UK strengths? What gain in there in restricting EU immigration, when most people now agree that immigration enhances our economy and culture, and economists know also enhance our public services. Yes, we would have more sovereignty: the sovereignty to make our lives worse with no compensations.

Whatever deal May finally does with the EU, and at whatever time, it remains the case that Brexit will do for UK sovereignty the opposite of what it claimed. It is better to follow EU rules than US rules, but with Brexit we will be following, with no say in how these rules are changed. It is a huge indictment of our political system that our Prime Minister and a majority of our MPs feel incapable of saying to people you were lied to, and following this course gives you less sovereignty than you had before June 2016. All we can hope for is that the Brexiters, in their new found position of Brexit rebels, will vote against the deal and let parliament, directly or indirectly, kill the whole thing off. The Brexiters will have caused enormous damage, but it would be poetic justice if they helped bring an end to Brexit.

Business Brexit Blues

Project Fear was the device that allowed those arguing for independence for Scotland to ignore the short term fiscal realities [1], and it was the device used by Leave to discount the countless warnings that Brexit could make the UK significantly poorer. The device was indulged by the broadcast media, who now duly quote it back at businesses who warn that jobs are at stake with any kind of hard Brexit.

There are good reasons why so many businesses have finally decided to make their concerns public. They have lost all faith that the government knows what it is doing, and they have recently lost faith in parliament restoring any kind of sanity. Hence the warnings from Airbus, BMW, and the society of Motor Manufacturers. This is no posturing, as figures for car industry investment show. These numbers will only jump back up once Brexit uncertainty ends if the final deal is a positive one as far as car makers are concerned. A UBS survey suggests that car makers are not unusual in this respect. 

So why are firms not excited by the opportunities a Tory Brexit will bring in terms of less regulation and ‘global Britain’? They know global Britain is a myth: they can export perfectly well outside the EU as it is, and they are more likely to get a good trade deal with third countries by being in the EU than outside it. Those who say that a post-Brexit UK could do trade deals tailor made to UK business misunderstand what trade deals are mainly about nowadays. They are about harmonisation of regulations. And if a country is going to harmonise its regulations, it will do this with the EU rather than the UK because the EU is a much larger market.

Which is why the prospect of a regulation free post-Brexit UK has little appeal to businesses that trade. What business wants is harmonised regulations, giving them less costs and a large market. The EU is really all about harmonisation of regulations. These include regulation on working hours or the environment because all these things are required to get a level playing field for business and therefore a true single and very large market.

As Anthony Barnett in a very interesting essay argues, the sovereignty argument for Brexit involves a huge misconception. What the EU does (human rights aside) is harmonise regulations. Most people, including Leavers, have little problem with that. What Brexiters did was relabel this as giving away sovereignty, which sounds bad. I often ask Leavers if they can name any EU law ‘imposed’ on the UK that they do not like, and I have yet to get anyone to respond with one. It is the principle, one said. But their inability to quote an example of loss of sovereignty reveals an underlying truth. The EU is about harmonisation of regulations, regulations that most people have no problem with.

I do not think this was just a deliberate bit of Leave deceit, although there was plenty of that. I suspect this was also a genuine lack of understanding among our out of touch, privileged elite. Partly as a result, when businesses ask for harmonised regulations in the form of the single market they are nonplused. Hence the response of the government to these warnings. They include the “fuck business” of Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt saying the warnings were “completely inappropriate” because it could undermine the prospects for a good deal! These replies reflect the bewildered fumbling of an elite that thought they were pro-business and suddenly finding that they are doing it considerable harm.

The irony is that any deal that is done will involve the UK still being subject to EU regulations, only without the UK having any effective say in how those regulations evolve. For the leavers who equated regulations with sovereignty, we will be less sovereign as a result of Brexit than we were before. Brexit as a project has failed. We continue with it simply because of a flawed referendum and because politicians cannot admit the truth to save their own reputations and for fear of the reaction of the Brexiter press.. 

It should also be the end of Project Fear, for those at least who still have an open mind and who do not believe everything they read in the Brexit press (which I admit may rule out around a third of the UK population). Project Fear, in the two main contexts that it has been used, is equivalent to the claim that we don’t need experts. Just as Faisal Islam reacted to Gove when he first talked about having enough of experts, so other journalists should react when Project Fear is used to bat away major expected costs based on expert analysis. Otherwise we just normalise a kind of Republican anti-science attitude that is now official US policy.

[1] although, to save a lot of comments, the term itself was invented by those arguing against independence.