Confident that the old British Rail was overstaffed, the new train companies downsized their drivers’ roster and cut back on training, on the assumption that it would be cheaper to poach drivers from rival companies than train their own. The union has as firm a grasp of the laws of supply and demand as the most dedicated free-market economist of the classical liberal school.Curious, then, that Aslef’s leader, Mick Rix, called this week for a return to national pay bargaining. This is rapidly becoming the “obvious” solution to the chain reaction of strikes that has brought disruption to rail users in various parts of the country. Bill Morris, the Transport and General Workers Union leader, backs the idea, and John Spellar, the minister responsible, agrees that greater national co-ordination of pay negotiations would be a good thing.This is a dangerous lurch towards the comforting delusions of the past. National pay bargaining is always and everywhere bad economics and bad politics. The only people who gain from it are trade union leaders, and the rail companies rightly reject the idea.It is not surprising that Mr Spellar – a former trade union official himself – would like to suppress competition in a market where skilled labour is in short supply, but any such attempt is bound to prove counter-productive. All that national bargaining is likely to achieve is to ensure that any strike brings the entire network to a halt rather than just parts of it.

That result might allow Railtrack to complete the engineering work on the network which, more than a year after the Hatfield crash, seems still not to have been finished, but the passengers are unlikely to be pleased.The train-operating companies may have misjudged the market but, while they are victims of competition at the moment, competition is also the best way out of the present mess. Higher pay for drivers will attract more recruits, and companies now realise they have a common interest in training.National pay bargaining will not return to the rail industry because, even if Railtrack has been renationalised, the train-operating companies remain in the private sector. It is only a pity that ministers fail to realise that the same principles apply in the public sector. National pay scales are one of the main causes of teacher shortages in our schools, and contribute to the inefficiency of large parts of the health service. Public service reform will be hobbled until head teachers and NHS managers are freed to set pay to suit their needs.The other cause of unrest in the rail industry is an issue that has long bedevilled industrial relations in Britain: differentials.

Guards are striking not in protest at being renamed revenue protection officers, but in defence of the ratio between their pay and that of drivers. That is a principle as outdated as national pay bargaining, and the companies are, again, right to resist.Levels of pay throughout the economy need to change constantly in order to reflect changing conditions and to recruit and retain the people best able to improve the productivity of their enterprise. The issue of what other people in the company are getting, let alone other people across the country, ought to be irrelevant.It is one of the worrying tendencies of the British, many years after we were re-educated in the virtues of free-market competition, that we still reach instinctively for state intervention and national planning whenever competition produces temporarily undesirable results, when the right response should be to call for more competition, not less.. I WAS in Nigeria when I heard that my nephew Jude Akapa had been killed He was only 15 years old.

After what was obviously a long period of bullying at school, he had been hit in the face and died later from a brain haemorrhage I had known nothing about the bullying Jude’s mother, Shola, had told everyone but me, it seems. She’d written to MPs, she’d told the police, and she’d told the principal of the school. We can see manifestations of this corrupting hatred all the time. We see the number of black youths who are involved in mobile-phone crime. We see that black girls are more likely to be excluded from school than their white peers.The death of my nephew was not a simple race issue. It would almost be easier to understand if it was a case of white boys picking on a black kid – but it’s not The bullies who killed my nephew were black. My nephew had come over from Nigeria to study, in the same way that Damilola Taylor did.