Ed Miliband told the Labour Party national policy forum that it was time to “set a new course for our railways which will be better for the taxpayer and properly serve passengers.”

Rail passengers, staff, trade unions and around 70 per cent of the electorate already know the best way to do that.

It is through taking the entire system back into public ownership and running our railways as an essential service, not as a profits milch cow for parasitic privateers.

Miliband regurgitated all the lines that campaigners have deployed since the system was privatised.

He highlighted the contrast between profits for the private sector and risk for the government, the success of the publicly owned East Coast mainline and the scandal of foreign public operators running franchises in Britain, but the Labour leader still failed to take a principled stand.

Trade union representatives who allowed themselves to be browbeaten into accepting the dog’s breakfast approved by the policy forum may well believe that it marks the “beginning of the end” for rail franchising.

But they should ask themselves why, if that is the case, the party leadership didn’t simply propose an end to the franchising system.

That’s because Miliband and shadow chancellor Ed Balls remain wedded to the European Union single-market model of a fragmented rail system with private profit at its core.

Allowing public-sector bodies to bid against the privateers is no solution to this situation.

Nor is the cosmetic reference to ending “the presumption against the public sector,” which will prove meaningless.

The only two things at which private rail companies excel is winning franchises and milking the network for profits.

The regularity with which privateers have won franchises, filled their boots for a couple of years and then walked away from the latter stages of a contract when larger contributions to the Exchequer are due shows that their franchise prospectuses are more fanciful than anything that the Brothers Grimm could conjure up.

The system is rotten. It has failed and the only thing to do is to get rid of it.

By opting for an apparent halfway house, which will in fact entrench the franchise system, the Labour leadership has missed a political open goal.

It has placed itself, like the Tories and Liberal Democrats, on the side of the private shareholders in rail companies rather than with rail passengers and taxpayers.

The party pretended for years that its main objection to restoring our railways to the public sector was the cost of compensating shareholders.

However, all rail unions have pointed out that bringing the railways back into public ownership could have been achieved without blood, sweat or great cost by simply transferring franchises to the public sector as they expire.

Labour’s refusal to do so can only be understood as a dogmatic political refusal to entertain a wholly publicly owned railway industry.

Wishful thinking that Miliband and Balls are intent on renationalisation by stealth and that “franchising has been given its last rites” will not commend itself to voters considering who to back in next year’s general election.

They will be a little more sceptical than national policy forum members have proved.

Their willingness to put party unity before political principle will ensure that the battle for a publicly owned rail network must continue against a parliamentary elite united in thrall to private profit.