Well it was all ideology. Trying to make out that the privatisation we got was some sort of well thought out process, arrived at through some sort of an objective process is nonsense. Suggesting at we should be grateful that our competitor countries have been able to extract a profit from our balkanised railway doesn't wash.
Again, you are arguing against something I never wrote or suggested.
As for ideologists getting things completely wrong you have to go no further than the nationalisation of the British railways in 1948 to see what a pig's ear the other lot of ideologists made of it.
Ive written this before but it is worth repeating. Sidney Webb wrote what became Clause IV (now superseded) of the Labour Partys constitution in 1917.
To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service.
In 1942 the annual Labour Party Conference passed a resolution urging the Government to coordinate road, rail and canal transport under national ownership. This idea of national ownership remained and was adopted by Labour in December 1944 and appeared in the 1945 election manifesto as There are basic industries ripe and over-ripe for public ownership and management in the direct service of the nation. These industries were the railways, coal, road transport, the Bank of England, civil aviation, external telecommunications, electricity, gas and steel.
The 1947 Act nationalising inland transport set up the British Transport Commission to encourage each form of transport to specialise in the types of services for which it was most suited. It also set up the public bodies known as 'Executives' to assist it in this task and act as its agents.
The ideologists completely screwed up as their chosen form of organisation could not - and did not - fulfil the aims set out for it in the Act.
The aim was the coordination of inland transport, so it would have been sensible to have set up the BTC functionally - engineering, operations, commercial, financial and so on - so the most effective mode, or modes, for a particular movement could have been identified. But the Act setting up the BTC also set up its 'agents' by form of transport, the Railway Executive (RE), the Waterways Executive, Road Haulage and so on, and the Government appointed the members of these Executives directly.
Of course the result was that each Executive fought its own corner and the BTC had little or no control over them - it did not control the Executives' budgets except at the highest level, it could not move Members of an Executive to a different job or fire those who were thwarting the aims of the Commission because these members of the Executives had been selected by the Government. Stalemate.
The BTCs financial remit was vague, to say the least To break even taking one year with another. No requirements about return on capital or service levels or improvements or safety or anything else. And the Common Carrier conditions were still in force which the Government did nothing to remove. And the Transport Commissioners for Rates - a Government creation - ensured that income lagged behind costs.
And the result of all this was the decline of the railways over the next 35 years to near insignificance for many, if not most, people in the country outside London and a couple of other large cities. Loss of freight traffic, loss of passenger traffic, closures of miles of railway even before Beeching, the waste of money building the BR Standard steam locomotives, the loss of 10 years development in diesel traction and the refusal to extend AWS until the Harrow accident. And so on.
And you go on about the ideologists who de-nationalised the railway. If you like railways the ones who should really bear the brunt of your wrath are the ones who set up BR in the first place.