There’s one place you’re unlikely to be reading this, and that is in a train seat. There aren’t any – or at least, only a few oddities such as the Gatwick Express coach replacement, or the Great Central Railway’s Boxing Day gala lunch trip from Loughborough to, er, Loughborough, on a steam train. Which I’m sure will be delightful, but doesn’t actually count as transport.

There won’t have been any trains yesterday, either. Unique among the main Western European nations, Britain closes its railways down for 58 hours. Nine others run trains on Christmas Day, eight of them managing a virtually normal service. Friends of the Earth is furious, saying: “It is time the rail industry helped people get out of their cars by running trains on Boxing Day at the very least.”

But the industry is immovable. Last year the director-general of the Association of Train Operating Companies admitted the problem and said: “We will have to look at this again.” He hasn’t. This year a spokesman said that it wouldn’t do it because it wouldn’t make a profit, and added grudgingly: “I suppose we would say, sorry . . . we will run trains if the Government funds them.” Which it doesn’t. So that’s it. No trains. Precious few buses. Everybody stranded, unless they drive. So they will drive, and the Department for Transport’s fatuous Act on CO2 campaign will ring hollow once again.

I have no axe to grind here. I can’t think of anything I want to do less today than travel, and am lucky enough to have most of the family within a mince pie’s throw of home. But, unlike the rail companies and the DfT, I have enough imagination to grasp what problems are caused – often to the least cushioned of our compatriots – by the festive dearth of even local trains. It isn’t merely a matter, as some scornfully say, of “getting to the sales early” or shortening your duty visit to relatives.

In a complicated, hypermobile society, many families are fragmented by geography or divorce, and children and inlaws must divide their time diplomatically over the few days they have free (and remember, some low-paid and low-status workers have very little time off indeed). Some essential workers are on duty on Christmas Day or Boxing Day, and would dearly like to get home for the other one. Nondriving teenagers might like to hop on the local train to a sports fixture, or a holiday job as a sales assistant, or a party with their own generation. In which latter case, even if they can drive, their parents would rather they didn’t.

It is, in short, a thundering inconvenience. And almost more importantly, it dramatises the difference in attitude between Britain and its neighbours. The difference is that, in Britain, public authorities and utilities find it difficult to grasp that they exist to provide a service. To us.

The default position of Government has become an attitude of impatient irritation at the way that mere citizens snarl up its administrative systems. It reminds me of the feeling I had (and suppressed) as a waitress, annoyed at having my nice clean tables cluttered up with diners. In the past few years – as we now know from the increasing instances of lost data by the Revenue and NHS – this irritation has turned to utter contempt.

How else is an unsupervised 23-year-old allowed to burn 25 million people’s confidential details on to a disc not once, but twice? How else is it possible that 350 people on witness protection programmes (scared people already, and often brave contributors to police work) were in that list that held – it is alleged and not denied – both their old and new identities together? How else is it possible for NHS trusts to dump health records – with names and phone numbers – in wheelie bins?

We know how all that works: in order to pare down the official Civil Service for political reasons, authorities subcontract data processing to private companies, who subcontract it to casual agencies employing any old twit. A friend in the North East describes how her gap-year sons (“hungover 18-year-olds”) were set to inputting confidential health records, with names, into a digital system, for the minimum wage. It may seem to make economic sense, but it is symptomatic of this universal, contagious lack of respect.

You think we have travelled a long way from the Transport Department’s insouciance about Christmas trains and the general decrepitude of transport systems? Not really. It’s the same sickness: the new British disease. The citizen is nagged about carbon emissions and then denied ecofriendly transport, and then nagged and taxed again for just doing what has to be done. The mantra of “data protection” is used to impede legitimate inquiries, while government agencies gaily entrust our records to incompetent goons and chuck our embarrassing medical details into open bins, and the DVLA sells our addresses to convicted criminals.

It is the open presumption that we are all racists, incapable of making our own decisions about how to relate to our neighbours or whether to make amiable jokes about the Welsh; and that we are probably paedophiles too, and may not take photos of our own children on the swings in a public park. Meanwhile, real children in public care go short of safety, attention and basic education. But authority believes that it is never wrong, and that we generally are.

So here’s a new year resolution for Gordon Brown to work on. Remember who’s paying for your administration, and show the people some decent deference. You could call it a Respect Agenda . . .

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