Consensus politics:

— Clarity of objectives;
— transparency in financial structures for all forms of transport, including clear identification of who should pay for uncommercial services;
— a level playing field for competition between rail and other transport modes;
— freedom to manage the business in a competent, professional way;
— new objectives, with cost-cutting targets replaced by clear targets for growth, quality of service and staff attitudes;
— bringing the aims of management, passengers and staff into line;
— freedom for BR to borrow and invest;
— a new rail watchdog to enforce better services, with money-back guarantees for persistent lateness.

A radical prospectus for Britian's railways, indeed: but whose is it? Could it be recycled from old 'Railtalks', a blueprint from a Transport 2000 think-tank, a political manifesto?

Read carefully, the list betrays differences of emphasis: we have put key points from two recent presentations together. The first four are BR chairman Sir Bob Reid's requirements for a European transport policy for quality, choice, innovation and efficiency. Pure commercial aims indeed.

But Sir Bob (albeit speaking of European transport policy, you understand, not British) significantly put some pretty old-fashioned. transport-professional-type aspirations into his four requirements for achieving commercial success. British Rail managers were burnt at the stake for less during the 1980s. Reid finds himself, thus far, alongside the European Commission's proposed rail policy, but diverges sharply on the separation of the management of infrastructure from operations: 'It simply will not do'. Speaking with a welcome conviction unheard of from BR when the various recipes for privatisation were being tossed around in the late 1980s, Reid stressed the interdependence of infrastructure, signalling and communications. The dismissal of infrastructure separation came, by amazing coincidence, shortly after it had been floated by Government sources as Malcolm Rifkind's favourite option for privatisation. But Reid seems to have support, for the same question had been addressed a few weeks earlier by the president of Netherlands Railways, Leo Ploeger, delivering the first Sir Robert Reid lecture to the Chartered Institute of Transport in London. He traced the genesis of infrastructure separation to a wish to correct the situation where infrastructure for private transport was a government responsibility, but infrastructure for public transport was a private affair (see 'Level Playing Field', list above!). An alternative solution would be to aim for a pricing structure truly reflecting the true costs of modes of transport. Stressing the growth of pollution and congestion in road transport, Ploeger said it was at last dawning that there were inter-relations between the volume of transport, the general level of transport prices, the modal split, and cost recovery rates of rail transport. He was of course realistic about the need for co-operation between Europe's largely separate rail networks.

Back to the list above. The final four points are paraphrased from the rail unions' Alternative to Privatisation, featured, like Sir Bob's speech, in our news pages. Even those elements of the unions' recipe which will meet with the frostiest response from the Department of Transport - the bit about increasing grant, for example — do command considerable support from all political directions, and while many may be cynical about the part played so far by the unions' Better Rail Campaign in creating that support, the public sympathy for their point of view is obvious. Their document contains some genuinely radical ideas, some of which, the consumer-oriented ones, BR should consider adopting before its hand is forced. And the central demand, that BR should be free to borrow and invest, hammers home the convergence of opinion on transport policy: Sir Bob makes virtually the same point.