Byers should have stayed in India

Click here for more Evening Standard columnists

My heart sank when I heard a London commuter plead on the radio yesterday for a government rescue. Please, he said, save us from these nightmare strikes. Anything, even Stephen Byers, was better than another cold, bleak night on Waterloo Station with no hope of home and bed.

The cry of nationalisations past echoed across the media. Where was Stephen Byers? Find Stephen Byers. "Byers in new strike storm." "Byers nowhere to be found." Every cartoon on the rail strike has derided Byers, and sometimes Tony Blair. What are they supposed to do?

If you had asked me the best place to put Mr Byers this week, I would have said in a Hindu temple in South India. All the hobgoblins of the unions and media could not reach him there. He would be immune to fidgety phone calls from Downing Street. He could do nothing but sink his feet in guano. Yet the political community, addicted to ministerial intervention, could only scream for his head. A near-hysterical interviewer on the Today programme demanded of the transport minister, John Spellar, where was Mr Byers, what did he know, when was he returning. It never occurred to her that South West Trains might be a private company.

On his return, Mr Byers rightly pointed this out. He may be out of his depth with much of transport policy but he calls a spade a spade. "I am not prepared to go back to the days ... when governments used to intervene directly in disputes of this nature," he said. The strike was wretched and sad, but not his affair.

Can he maintain this admirable detachment? This morning it emerged that Mr Byers's number two, John Spellar, was already involved. He had, according to an official Downing Street spokesman, "been in contact with the relevant parties". Mr Spellar had "nudged both sides here and there" in a search for common ground. If that is not government intervention, what is?

Such talk shows how the cookie is crumbling. The unions see Mr Byers stuf fing money into Railtrack administration. They see the warm glow of renationalisation on the horizon. The company, for its part, wants its franchise renewed. It wants its claim of a "higher cost base" acknowledged. Tormented by cartoonists and political foes, the Government is inching back into railway industrial relations. We should all buy shares in beer and sandwiches.

Not much was right about Tory rail privatisation, but it did at least leave private-sector managers sovereign over running the trains. In the London area, they faced soaring passenger numbers and a chronic shortage of drivers by struggling free of many union restrictions. They have run a remarkably strike-free network for the past five years.

Push has come to shove. The Government intervened to demand "50 per cent more passengers" by 2010. This immediately told drivers that they had a job for life. Many were already earning so much money that other ranks wanted the same. There is a union election pending. The companies will need strong nerves to sit out this crisis. Customers will indeed be held to ransom. But what encourages such ransom is the hope of government intervention.

In the old days, the minister did rush back from holiday. He summoned the rail bosses and loftily informed them that commuters were angry and ministers "concerned". Could they not find more money, and fast, and give it to the unions? The bosses said yes, if the government gave more subsidy. The minister duly called the Treasury and leaked to the Press that he had "saved the day". Next year there was another minister and another strike.

The goal of any union in a dispute is to project it upwards. It seeks to raise the cost and therefore the political profile of the conflict, for politics is about compromise not rectitude. That is why the unions want a return to nationalisation, and why ministers are playing with fire in going down that path.

The chief aim of privatisation was to escape this bind. Indeed, the Government's obsession with privatising the Tube is based entirely on the "efficiency gains" from tough, devolved management. Any minister intervening in the present dispute will signal to the Tube bidders that they may at any time be vulnerable to buying out of an embarrassing strike. Nothing is more likely to sabotage these contracts.

Uncertainty on this scale damages every part of the industry. Ask in any rail enquiry office, and you immediately know that nobody is in charge. There is no strategic continuity. Subcontractors-demand huge profit margins. Bright young people cannot be recruited. The strain is evident on staff, whose dedication and loyalty are essential to any service industry.

Three years ago, John Prescott introduced his "10-year plan" for the railway with all the razzmatazz of Nye Bevan launching the NHS. It was the arrival on track of "joined-up thinking". Since then we have had a stage army of meddlers: David Begg, Tom Winsor, Sir Alastair Morton, the Treasury's Shriti Vadera, Railtrack's bailiffs, the Cabinet Office Delivery Unit, the Downing Street Forward Strategy Unit and now the BBC's "limousine king", Lord Birt. The whole business is beyond parody. I wonder what the Labour Party would make of it, if we had one.

The point of the cumbersome Department for Transport, Local Government and the Regions was to impose a clear and stable framework under which private rail companies could offer the public a service. I believe this will only happen when Railtrack is dismembered and its assets and obligations loaded squarely onto the regional rail companies. That has yet to happen. Instead, we have everyone chasing control and no one finding it.

Meanwhile, a strike must be faced down. Mr Byers must not face it down, nor must Mr Blair. That is not their job. South West Trains is in charge. Fair-weather privatisation is always a disaster.