Re: [Update] Jeremy Corbyn wins Labour Leadership
 

You better invite all your friends around then.;)

Re: [Update] Jeremy Corbyn wins Labour Leadership
 

Clarkson would probably do a better job than Corbyn. :D

Re: [Update] Jeremy Corbyn wins Labour Leadership
 

It's pretty controversial if you're old enough to remember what British Rail was like! Strewth, would you really want to go back to filthy trains, underinvestment and inefficiency, not to mention the catering!

In any case, nationalisation of the railways would be against EU rules, so I'd love to know how Mr Corbyn thinks he could pull that off!

Fortunately, we won't need to worry about that as the electorate will never allow this man to have any position of power in this country.

Re: [Update] Jeremy Corbyn wins Labour Leadership
 

Why does it have to go back to that or anything else, we had a public railway on the east coast which made money for us and had high levels of customer satisfaction.

This article, if factual is hard to ignore in spite of its bias

http://actionforrail.org/government-...fore-election/

as is this one about how we botched the origional sell of

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...says-Tory.html

Re: [Update] Jeremy Corbyn wins Labour Leadership
 

do you remember when it was affordable to use the train ?

Re: [Update] Jeremy Corbyn wins Labour Leadership
 

Even Conservative supporters are in favour of renationalising the railways so if it was renationalised then it would get pretty widespread support across the country.

Re: [Update] Jeremy Corbyn wins Labour Leadership
 

I remember when trains were disgusting, perpetually late, frequently cancelled, subject to regular strike action and the network badly run down. All that was achieved during BR's time due to lack of govt. investment and the required will to build a decent network. Would it be any different under Labour? The party which, despite all their promises and huge borrowing, failed to build council houses and dithered for an eternity about the future of our power generating capacity to the extent that we're still at risk from blackouts in the not too distant future. Trust them with running the railways? No thanks.

Re: [Update] Jeremy Corbyn wins Labour Leadership
 

A lot of countries around Europe have nationalised rail companies and pretty good railways. I don't think nationalisation is the answer to everything, not even most things, but privatisation isn't always the answer either.

In the UK we do have a tendency to religiously assume that going private is always better no matter what. Even if it means coming up with really convoluted schemes to try and implement it in industries which are not a natural fit for it. The rail network in Britain is a mess. We have the network itself owned by the state after the privatised firm collapsed, we have had a number of cases where the state has had to take over failing franchises, we had that scenario with the West Coast Mainline being won with an absurdly optimistic bid from First Group which was only overturned on the eve of a court case brought by Virgin Trains.

Competition should be the main driver of effectively, investment and better services but the tender process means that doesn't really happen. People can't elect to use a rival service so it's only the Government who judges the competition and they tend to pick the biggest bidder irrespective of the qualities of the bid. So now the franchise has a set amount of time to turn a profit on the line whilst providing the service and returning money to shareholders before they have to hand it back! This is hardly a good approach for long-term investment by the operators is it?

It seems to me that it has become a mantra that privatisation is good and nationalism is bad that allows this to continue. I wonder if other countries are as obsessed with this fight between the two or if they have gotten over it and just decide what to do on a case-by-case basis.

Re: [Update] Jeremy Corbyn wins Labour Leadership
 

The hand-back of East Coast and the debacle over the West Coast franchise both had the same root cause: civil servants in the DoT who were utterly hopeless. In the case of East Coast they drafted a franchise agreement that put all the risk on the State - it simply begged over-optimistic franchise bids because the winning operator had the option to hand back the franchise and walk away if they later found they couldn't make it work. On the West Coast the civil service was simply inept and created a tick-box bid assessment process that wasn't able to weed out obvious accounting tricks that appeared to show First could generate a bigger return to the State than Virgin (despite Virgin Trains' 20-odd years' experience of actually running the line), except of course that the big returns were all way back at the very end of the franchise period, giving First the chance to make like National Express and simply hand it back, without the promised returns ever materialising.

DOR ran East Coast competently but registered consistently lower passenger satisfaction than Virgin West Coast and returned half as much money to the exchequer per passenger mile as South Western. It has been impossible up to now to say empirically how good the State really was at running the East Coast because there was no comparable private operator on the same route at the same time. However I confidently predict that Virgin will improve on DOR's performance over the lifetime of its new franchise on the East Coast.

Re: [Update] Jeremy Corbyn wins Labour Leadership
 

I don't disagree with any of that but I think it highlights the weaknesses of the franchise system. It gets decided in a backroom somewhere with the forces of competition never coming into play - surely a key part of why privatisation has worked elsewhere - and no one really knows where to place the blame for poor service due to the myriad of sectors involved in the entire thing. It feels liked a messy way to try and privatise a service which isn't a natural fit for it.

There must be a better system than this. Even if it doesn't involve nationalisation I think we have to revisit it.

Re: [Update] Jeremy Corbyn wins Labour Leadership
 

On the contrary, the civil service actively tried to create a credible process for deciding who gets franchises. They tried to create what amounted to a spreadsheet into which the bids could be put, with various calculations designed to show which operator would be best. The problem was that they made a pig's ear of their spreadsheet and they were too afraid of charges of smoky, backroom dealings to actually put a pair of eyes on the bid documents and identify questionable assertions by the bidders (such as, in the case of the West Coast, the line returning next to nothing for about 17 years and then suddenly generating a very nice return to the taxpayer right at the end).

Re: [Update] Jeremy Corbyn wins Labour Leadership
 

I can fully agree with you on that. :tu:

We should be able to enjoy the benefits of privatisation whilst at the same benefiting from the scope for standardisation and huge buying power which comes with the scale of national organisations.

Re: [Update] Jeremy Corbyn wins Labour Leadership
 

It never has been for me, which is why I've always used the bus when travelling by public transport!

Re: [Update] Jeremy Corbyn wins Labour Leadership
 

Don't remember it feeling cheap when I was commuting either. into London either. Dirty, disgusting, unreliable on the other hand...

Re: [Update] Jeremy Corbyn wins Labour Leadership
 

And what exactly was invested in the railway by the public sector during this period?

We need to stop basing our opinions on 'bite size' comments!

---------- Post added at 17:15 ---------- Previous post was at 17:04 ----------

Yes, that's what I remember. I think too many people are looking at former decades with rose coloured spectacles!