LONDON -- Faced with labor unrest and growing passenger anger over Britain's troubled railways, government ministers debated Thursday whether the country's train system is the worst in Europe -- or merely awful, reports a wire service.

Peter Hain, a minister in the Foreign Office, told The Spectator magazine that Britain had “the worst railways in Europe.”

“We started transport investment far too late,” he said, in effect accusing Prime Minister Tony Blair of neglecting the issue immediately after winning power in 1997.

Headlines in several newspapers Thursday played up Hain's estimate that Britain's railways are Europe's worst -- a damaging charge in a country that tends to look down on its European partners.

Transport Minister Stephen Byers acknowledged that “certain aspects” of the rail system had gotten worse since 1997, but protested that it was “debatable” whether Britain had the worst railways in Europe.

Meanwhile, a two-day strike by the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers snarled commuter service Monday and Tuesday, and the union set another strike for Jan. 24-25.

ScotRail services in Scotland has been disrupted by a labor dispute and Arriva Trains Northern in northern England faces stoppages Jan. 24-25, plus Feb. 5-6.

A rail passengers' group is trying to arrange a boycott March 1.

Blair on Wednesday criticized the strikes and urged the union, which rejected a 7.6 percent pay rise, and employers to take their differences to arbitration.

Labor unrest revives bitter memories for the Labor Party.

Strikes during the “winter of discontent” in the 1970s, when garbage piled up on streets and the dead couldn't be buried, proved to be the undoing of the Labor Party government of James Callaghan, and it took the party 18 years to win another national election.

Blair accuses previous Conservative governments of starving the rail system of investment and then breaking up the nationalized system in a complicated privatization that failed to improve service.

Railtrack, the company created to maintain the tracks and other infrastructure, was one of the most heavily criticized aspects of privatization, especially after a broken rail was blamed for a train wreck Oct. 17, 2000, that killed four people.

A year later, after a crash program of nationwide repairs caused massive disruptions to service, the government eliminated Railtrack by withdrawing subsidies.

Blair acknowledged Wednesday that he perhaps should have acted sooner.

“It could have been said that post-1997, the moment that we came to power, we should have realized that that privatization could not work in any shape or form,” Blair said in the House of Commons.

Byers, the transport minister, said he needed to accept that things ``are not good enough.''

“We've got to take the decisions that are necessary to ensure that the traveling public will get a far better deal in the future,” he said Thursday.