BACK in 1995, in the days of hope and expectation that a Labour government would represent a qualitative change from the Tories, Labour leader Tony Blair gave a solemn pledge.

He promised that, under Labour, there would be a “publicly owned and publicly accountable railway.”

Not only did Labour renege on that pledge but, these days, despite the obvious failure of the railways sell-off and the overwhelming popular opposition to privatisation, it has become a champion of this shabby Tory policy.

Rail Minister Tom Harris told a BBC Wales programme on Tuesday night: “Ideologically and practically speaking, a private railway has provided a level of investment, innovation and imagination that wouldn’t have happened if British Rail had stayed as it was.”

He seems unaware that the privatised railways attract around four times the subsidy that British Rail received and one of the touted benefits of privatisation was that the privateers would profit from their efficiencies and phase out subsidies.

We were fed lies then and we are still being fed lies. Privatisation is not a policy based on sober assessment of its benefits. It is a matter of neoliberal dogma.

No Labour government has ever announced its intention of abolishing council housing. Neither has Labour conference voted for such a benighted policy. But that is, in reality, the government’s policy, from which it will not be diverted.

It uses public finance to draw up plans for stock transfers of entire housing estates to the private sector, authorises public funds to put out slanted pro-private propaganda and refuses to allow refurbishment of local authority properties if tenants vote to remain with the council.

Nor has any Labour government ever announced its intention of privatising the NHS.

But the Gordon Brown government, like that of Tony Blair before him, is carving the heart out of the NHS, once again deploying public funds to make health care a commodity out of which the privateers can gouge profit.

Mr Brown’s flawed private finance initiative obsession is still used to replace NHS hospitals and clinics with new facilities that are privately owned and leased back to the NHS at extortionate rates.

Similar developments are taking place in other public services such as state education and the Prison Service, where the efficient, economic and democratically accountable public alternative is systematically undermined and discarded in favour of the sleazy, expensive but hugely profitable private option. And that’s without taking account of the plunder of the previously public utilities such as water, electricity and gas, which were milked of their assets for overseas investment.

Barely a week passes without another scandal in the private sector, with sky-high profits for banks, oil companies and other sectors and directors touching for multimillion-pound pay-offs for either success or failure.

The new TUC Touchstone pamphlet will add to public awareness of the scandals associated with privatisation, but we should not expect any acceptance by new Labour that it is wrong and that it will change course.

The case for public ownership has never been more pressing. It must become a major labour movement campaigning issue now, because our entire post-World War II gains are at risk.