I suppose one bonus of today's headlines about Corbyn is that the railways really are front page news nowadays. The only times I remember that happening pre-privatisation were the occasional strike and the occasional crash.
I don't think there would have been much opinion over nationalisation/ privatisation thirty years ago, when rail travel was very much a minority thing. Nowadays, with increased passenger numbers, it's becoming a much bigger issue - a lot more people are dependent upon it - the increased visibility can only be a good thing.
I enjoyed reading your post - but it really is 'Osborne'. The other was where Queen Victoria died (not many people know that
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Oops!
I get annoyed when people mis-spell the names of politicians ("Bliar"/ "Camoron" etc), so I should at least make the effort to get Osborne's name right!
Can't let the "Magic Money Tree" economics! go unanswered. It's an easy put down but do you know how economics work? Because if you do I reckon you are alone in the world.
We know that Britain prints its own currency. That we bought off the banks and used Quantitative Easing to get them lending again. The result is not lots of nice lending to small businesses - that's still less than before the crash - it is sky high house prices, bankers bonuses still preserved and - the thing everyone was convinced wouldn't happen, deflation. We've now got inflation of nil tho' Osborne has told the Bank of England he wants 2%. It has never delivered it - so much do they know about the economy! Additionally growth is extremely limited.
So the banks have eaten of the Magic Money Tree and have effectively lined their own pockets. Corbyn reckons its time for another strategy. Let the people eat of the Magic Money Tree and pay for some green technology, better broadband, social housing, enhanced training, better communications, abolish PFI and so on. This would create extra jobs and people in jobs buy more things and pay tax!
People think it's like printing money, which it is. But then so is every time the government issues gilts. But if issuing gilts is all fine and dandy how does doing it a different form make it somehow wrong? The argument is that the government shouldn't be doing things that the markets can do. Well as we've seen Drax doesn't want to do its new technology without government help, social housing is hardly built at all by any private companies, broadband needs speeding up - and so on.
Basically all Corbyn is saying is we need more investment in the UK. We control Sterling, we don't have to wait for others to do the investment. The same system will also provide a home for much pension fund money, whose value (as a result of their earlier fondness for stock market investment) has dropped off a cliff. Cannot believe they would not be delighted to find a safe home.
So not a Magic Money Tree - more of a Virtuous Circle!
It should have been done years ago.
It's even been reluctantly endorsed by the business editor of the Daily Torygraph so Mr Corbyn is not exactly in revolutionary company!
Well, RPI is 1.1% at the moment.
I'm all for investment, as long as we are okay to fund the cost over the medium/ long term. Similarly no problem if the Government issues fixed term gilts, so that they are committed to repaying the money after twenty/ fifty years (etc).
I though Gordon Brown had a reasonable approach for separating "investment" from "government spending", since the investment cycle isn't necessarily the same as the peaks/ troughs in overall government expenditure.
The problem I have is the "the Bankers got free money, so why can't we have free money too" approach, that seems to be gaining support.
People keep talking about 'EU won't allow' etc. All the rules (agreed by us of course) say, is that the two sides of railway management (operations and infrastructure provision) must be in separate organisations. There are plenty of examples of this being implemented with both sides being nationally owned.
One thing I've never understood with the "the EU won't allow it" argument is why the railways in Northern Ireland haven't been privatised - if the EU allow it in the Northern Industrial Town of Belfast then why do people think the EU won't allow it on this side of the water?
(am not saying I'm pro/anti, just that the Northern Irish example shows that we don't seem to have to worry about the EU there)
Do you really believe that 74% are happy with Southeastern and 80% with AGA? These surveys are never 100% accurate
Even with a 5% margin of error a majority of passengers are happy with the service they are given. Whats to say as well that Network South East was any better
I think we have to believe the statistics (in the absence of anything better).
If you spend your life complaining to other people on Twitter about how bad things are, then you'll get a skewed view of most people's experiences - but if as many people hated the TOCs as is suggested then there'd be virtually no off-peak travellers.
I'd like to put this myth to rest. There are not hordes of people attributing delays and I made the point to RDG, in response to the McNulty Report, that they actually do a useful job - delays need to be attributed so that you can get to the root cause and therefore improve performance. There has been too much "man marking" in the past, but in many cases things have improved. In any case, the majority of staff working on this are employed by the nationalised NR, rather than the TOCs.
The other thing I'd say, having done some comparisons in the past, is that the % of HQ staff to frontline at TOCs compares (very) favourably with NR, BR and any government run organisation, e.g. the NHS, the Armed Forces or the Police. Privatisation does not give rise to more managers; it's government agencies that love bureaucracy
Interesting, thanks.
I agree about the benefits of "root cause" investigations and know that in my own line of work, a financial incentive to tackle your biggest weaknesses can work wonders.
As an example, a colleague travels home each evening on a Cross Country service that is generally on time at New Street and generally late after leaving Water Orton - under the current system, whatever causes that delay there is responsible for compensating XC for any delays that they incur. Fair enough.
I was just trying to make the point that any "nationalised" railway would still need to have people doing the counting (to attribute costs/ delays between different sectors, freight, Open Access etc), so the supposed "saving" often claimed will probably be negligible.
