Ministers defeated on call to take back railways

Tony Blair today suffered a second embarrassing defeat as Labour conference delegates voted 2-1 to bring the railways back into public ownership.

Delegates have already delivered one defeat on the Labour leadership this week over council housing policy.

Labour made a desperate attempt to defeat the union-backed call for renationalisation, wheeling out Transport Secretary Alistair Darling to claim it would scupper £70 million of private investment a week. This, he said, "doesn't make much sense. We need every penny we can get."

Now the unions face the near-impossible task of getting the conference decision written into the party's election manifesto. No 10 sources had already discounted the possibility of public ownership becoming official party policy.

Today's confirmation of last night's show of hands showed that, in a card vote, 63.71 per cent of delegates backed renationalisation.

Gerry Doherty, of the Transport & Salaried Staffs Association, said: "This isn't pie in the sky. We already have one franchise, South Eastern Trains, being run in the public sector by the Strategic Rail Authority, and it is performing well."