Respectfully ... that's a heap of nonsense. East Coast has consistently lower passenger satisfaction ratings than its north-south competitor, (privately operated) Virgin West Coast, and returns half as much money to the exchequer per passenger mile than (privately operated) South West Trains. We have no way of knowing whether DOR's performance is as good as it should be on the route it operates as there has not been a recent competitive tender for it. Virgin and SWT both suggest, in different ways, that DOR could, perhaps should, be doing better.
It has taken massive private investment to bring back our railways from the brink of collapse, a state of affairs caused by British Railways and its 40-year addiction to government finance as a means of getting anything done - an approach which, for example, led to the APT project being cancelled because it didn't return on State investment quickly enough, only for the tech to be sold overseas, refined and then sold back to us as the Pendolino.
There's plenty of room for improvement in the way the system is franchised and regulated, but anybody who seriously claims that nationalisation is a better option, is either not old enough to remember how utterly crap British Rail was, or is suffering a really serious case of rose-tinted spectacle syndrome.
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/mart...b_3973007.html