I'm not passionate about Virgin. I'm backing Branson out of fear of the new

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/31/im-not-passionate-about-virgin

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As a user of several Virgin services – broadband, telephone and trains – I've grown used to the idea that Richard Branson thinks of me as a good bloke, a chum and a mate. Maybe he imagines we went to school together, stomped our feet to Jefferson Airplane, grew beards at the same time, made bets on who would shave first. Anyhow, he knows me well enough not to stand on ceremony, so it was no surprise when he dropped me an email the other day beginning "Hi Ian".

Usually all Dickie wants me to do is buy stuff from him. This time, though, he was urging me to sign a petition, which he hoped would help to make the government "see sense" and reconsider its decision to award the west coast mainline franchise to FirstGroup. He stressed that "a member of the public" had started the petition and that it was "completely independent" of the Virgin Group; nevertheless, by signing I would be letting the government know "how passionately we all feel about keeping the west coast mainline as a Virgin Trains franchise".

I clicked on the link and signed. The idea that I feel "passionately" about Virgin retaining its franchise is, of course, ludicrous – until a few years ago, I felt, if anything, the reverse. Like many travellers on the lines to London from the Midlands, the north-west and Scotland, I had had enough of engineering works, bus substitutions and cancelled trains. Standard-class seats in Virgin's much-vaunted Pendolinos were as cramped as a charter flight's; the lavatories' sophisticated electronics often went wrong; what on older trains had been a spacious buffet was now a cramped shop.

You might have called these the physical disadvantages of Branson travel – a little unfairly because some of them stemmed from work on upgrading the line, which meant closures and diversions that were beyond his control. But the psychological drawbacks were almost as grave. You felt you were travelling inside a one-man brand: the Virgin logo with its dated notion of youthfulness splattered everywhere, as though we were the late Jimmy Savile's lads and lassies rather than elderly couples from Milngavie on their way to see daughters in Milton Keynes. The railway floated free of geography – no new London, Midland & Scottish to match the regional titles of other franchises – and paid no respect to history. It cut journey times and enjoyed higher profit margins than those of most other train-operating companies, but that was largely due to public investment in new infrastructure.

So what has made me and more than 100,000 others sign a petition to save it? The personal reasons will vary. My own are that a concessionary railcard plus some advanced online planning mean a first-class fare to Glasgow is nearly as cheap as going standard. The journey now takes only four hours 30 minutes, the trains mainly run to time, staff are competent and friendly. These things and the passage of time have evaporated most of my loathing for the word "Virgin" when I see it on the sides of the carriages.

A more important reason, however, is fear of the new, of what may come next: a typically modern British anxiety and perfectly understandable, given Michael Gove and his schools, Andrew Lansley and the NHS, and the Major government that privatised the railways 15 years ago. Just before his death in 2010, historian (and railway enthusiast) Tony Judt said words to the effect that the duty of a public intellectual had once been to imagine a better society, while now his or her duty was to try to prevent a worse one. This is worth remembering.

As a traveller rather than a public intellectual, I asked myself what could be worse than Virgin. The answer came back that Horizon could. Not Horizon the defunct package holiday company or the literary magazine edited by Cyril Connolly, but the name rumoured to be favoured by FirstGroup for the services it will take over from Branson. (Neither parliamentary debate nor Branson's legal challenge is likely to prevent it; Branson looks like a bad loser who had no problem with the rules until he lost the game.) But how will FirstGroup afford the £5.5bn it must pay the government for its 13-year franchise, a sum Branson and others think the railway's income can never afford? Through growth in traffic, says Tim O'Toole, FirstGroup's chief executive: more seats, more trains, cheaper fares, more passengers. This is a good deal, he told the BBC, "good for our passengers, good for the government, good for our shareholders".

I signed the petition soon after I heard O'Toole list his triple beneficiaries. Onwards and spectacularly upwards in a stagnant economy: an unlikely prospect for a transport business unless a hard-faced genius is at the helm. Similar promises were made when first GNER and then National Express won the east coast mainline by paying too much to a greedy Treasury. But that was in the boom times, and even then, as we know, the route had to be returned to public ownership. FirstGroup will almost certainly need to cut costs as well as raise revenue. With luck, the trains may be no worse than if Branson and his partner Stagecoach had held on to them and imposed their own cost-cutting, but it is hard to see how they can be better when the principle that governs franchising is "best value" for the public purse rather than the traveller.

Impermanence is the franchise's other feature. Nothing lasts. No service can grow into "an institution", to form a familiar part of the landscape, a background to our lives. When a franchise changes hands, liveries and uniforms must change; such is the childish ego of the brand. Nothing is sacred, no matter how much it has been sentimentalised and celebrated by the public it serves. The red and black funnels of Calmac ferries, for example, which have symbolised a vital transport in the Clyde and the Hebrides since the mid-19th century, may be gone next year, along with Calmac itself, when the company's contract with the Scottish government comes up for renewal. Calmac is wholly owned by the Scottish government – services to the Western Isles are rarely a paying proposition – but EU law requires competitive tendering, so Calmac's assets, its ships and piers, have been transferred to a new company that will lease them to the successful bidder. At railway privatisation, rolling stock and train services were similarly divided.

This is a complicated story (the clearest account can be found on news website forargyll.com), but the struggle against its probable outcome has already accounted for the departure of Calmac's chief executive, Archie Robertson, whose resignation was announced this week. Serco, the company that has made its fortune from outsourced government services, is a likely winner. It already runs the ships that sail to Orkney and Shetland after a successful bid last year.

The departure of Calmac from the Clyde and the Minch would for many people be an unthinkable loss, of far more cultural and historic significance than the struggle between Branson and FirstGroup. Someone should start a petition. I know someone who recalls the words of Tony Judt, and will sign.