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Rail privatisation was a controversial, widely unpopular policy whose implementation was not inevitable. This article employs counterfactual history methodology to examine whether the move to rail privatisation in Britain might have failed. It places the privatisation proposals in context by examining opposition within the Conservative Party and British Rail. The paper then focuses on three key counterfactual questions, including the significance of New Labour's reversal of its commitment to renationalise rail under its 'third way' policy and the possible consequences had the move to privatise rail failed. Based on the historical evidence available, it concludes that the move to rail privatisation could have failed, and that performance would have been better had rail remained an integrated, nationalised industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores institutionalism and New Labour as overlapping and intersecting responses to neoliberalism and the New Right. It links institutionalism to the Labour Party and its advocacy of networks and joined-up governance in much the same way as we have come to tie neoliberalism to the New Right and its faith in the new public management. Because the paper's interpretive approach modifies institutionalism, the link it draws between New Labour and institutionalism also points to something of a critique of these latter. At times, they seek to tame the contingency of social life by reducing the complex to theories about the allegedly given characteristics of institutional forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]