It's not just the railways that are in crisis – our energy and water industries are collapsing too

Everyone screwed up… including us. That’s basically what the Office of Rail and Road is saying about the chaos that ensued when the rail industry launched a big bang timetable revolution in May.

It was supposed to usher in new services, more seats and rolling stock, improved reliability. Instead it stomped on an awful lot of people – as revolutions often do. The trouble with scattering the blame around everyone, as the watchdog has done, is that it also serves to scatter the responsibility for fixing the problem.

In six months, a year’s time, when something goes pop again? It’s his fault. No, no, no it’s her fault. Actually, we’ve come together and decided that it’s their fault. No, no, wait. It’s everyone’s fault. We’re really, really sorry and gosh darn it, we promise we’ll try harder.

But wait, what’s this. Transport secretary Chris “I don’t run the railways” Grayling has announced a review. Well that’ll fix it. After all, it’s going to be led by a real railway expert: the former British Airways boss Keith Williams. And there’ll be reforms. They promise. By 2020.

Well, maybe. This is, of course, based on several assumptions. The first is that Williams doesn’t frighten the children in government by saying something scary that might actually address some of the railways’ problems. The second is that Grayling is still in his job. (He shouldn’t be, but – don’t forget – he’s a Brexiteer. To keep her cabinet balanced, Theresa May feels she has to have a set number of swivel-eyed loons in her team, even if it means upsetting the public.)

The third assumes we even have a country after Brexit crashes down on all of our heads. The fourth? Oh, who cares. As you and I have already accurately guessed, Grayling’s review won’t change a thing. When your entire policy agenda is based around keeping right-wing newspapers onside, mistakes are inevitable. The trouble for that government is that even Daily Mail readers are starting to think that nationalisation isn’t such a bad idea.

Grayling has said that it’s “not about ownership”. He’s got a point; what really matters to the travelling public isn’t the structure of the industry but what it delivers.

But delivering is what the rail industry is not doing – at least not for the travelling public, the economy, or the environment (through keeping cars off our clogged up roads). It’s working only for operators, which are still mostly making nice profits, because when they don’t make money they just hand their franchises back for the government to parcel up and sell on to someone else.

It isn’t just in the railways where problems are festering, however. Take the water industry. You won’t see its operators giving up their licences in a hurry. Why would they? There are alternatives to the railways, but water companies exclusively provide something people can’t do without. And all of them make pots of cash for doing so, much of which then disappears offshore or into the pockets of overseas pension funds.

It might not have made the sort of splash (sorry) that the rail story has, but three water companies have just been told to improve their service by the Consumer Council for Water on Thursday (Bristol Water, SES Water in Surrey and Southern Water). Trouble is, repeated raps across the knuckles have no more effect on their behaviour than they do on Dennis and Gnasher in the pages of the Beano.

Want more? How about energy, where a Tory Party that privatised the market has just introduced a price capping regime. You know, the sort of thing that it said would burn us all in commie hellfire when Ed Miliband first floated the idea (in the form of a price freeze) during his spell as Labour leader.

“But, but, but... privatisation has delivered huge benefits and pots of investment. Billions and billions and billions of pounds have come in.” This is what people like Grayling like to say when Jeremy Corbyn and others talk about nationalisation and, to their surprise, the public starts to listen with interest.

The problem with that investment is that while it has produced a handsome return for the companies involved in these respective industries, the returns to the consumer are much harder to see. That alone explains why Corbyn is finding a hearing.

Grayling says that it’s not about ownership, but the owners of these industries are failing. So people are starting to think that maybe it is.