RAIL workers marking Network Rail’s return to public ownership this morning outside the body’s HQ have good cause to feel vindicated.

The former not-for-dividend private company runs Britain’s stations and track and the idea that such crucial infrastructure could be privately owned was always absurd.

As RMT acting general secretary Mick Cash argues, this should be the signal to renationalise the entire railway system.

The “profiteering, fragmentation and underinvestment” he slams as the legacy of John Major’s rail privatisation have left us with the most expensive — and some of the least reliable — trains in Europe.

Again and again the privateers have failed to deliver on their audacious promises — that the services they run will be cheaper and more passenger-friendly than those the public sector does.

Indeed, it was the disastrous failure of privatised Railtrack that led to the government creating Network Rail in 2002, just as in 2009 the public had to step in to run the East Coast Main Line after National Express defaulted on its contract to do so.

The Con-Dem coalition, in the pockets of the tycoons who use their rail contracts to leech billions from the public purse, still intends to hand East Coast back to the vultures in February.

And warnings that Network Rail itself is not safe in their hands are timely. 

As we see in its approaches to healthcare, schools, security and everything else, evidence counts for nothing for the Con-Dems. If they can sell a service they will, however obvious it is that privatisation delivers worse services at a higher cost.

This makes it necessary to elect a Labour government in May — even Labour’s feeble pledge to allow the public sector to compete for contracts is an improvement on the knee-jerk contempt for public services shown by the current Cabinet.

But it also makes it essential that we ramp up the pressure against the elephant in the room — the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).

The weekend saw another national day of action against TTIP, but the problem this secretive EU-US trade deal will pose for any progressive government has still not sunk in.

Clauses allowing private firms to sue any government over laws which might affect their profits would have scuppered most of the advances working people have won over the past century and a half.

Paid holidays affect corporate profits. So do pensions. So do redundancy payments, the minimum wage, the obligation to ensure staff work in a safe environment free of the risk of injury or death and much else besides.

All are essential hallmarks of a civilised society, wrenched from the unwilling grip of the capitalist class by trade union struggle.

But calling a halt to the privatisation gravy train would have a huge impact corporations’ ability to wring profit out of services built up and maintained at public expense.

We can expect any government renationalising the railways or lopping off the private-sector tentacles suffocating our NHS to face legal action if TTIP goes ahead.

Motions committing the TUC to fight this anti-democratic treaty,  which enshrines the supremacy of corporate power over democratic decision-making, will be put forward at the TUC Congress next week.

But Labour remains absurdly silent on one of the most significant international treaties for decades.

No doubt a generation of idolising the neoliberal big business club that is the EU leave it too confused and terrified to resist, like a dog that won’t fight back when its owner tries to drown it.

It’s high time the labour movement wakes up. Unity against TTIP is the only way to save — and rebuild — our public services.