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Old 11-05-2017, 11:57   #471
Osem
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Re: June 8th General Election

Quote:
Originally Posted by Damien View Post
The French and German rail networks are pretty good. Why can't Britain do it? I think half of the reason is the government wants to abdicate responsibility for it so no one gets blamed when something like Southern Rail happens. Major investment still has to be done by the government anyway, it's not like telecoms where privatisation led to proper competition and infrastructure development as a result.
Because nobody really wants their taxes to rise in order to pay for the decades of under-investment which happened when they were publicly owned? In theory yes it ought to be the best way but as I said before, history in the UK indicates it wasn't. Yes that could probably be changed with an entirely different govt. approach but all the evidence is that Corbyn's rooted in 1970's ideology and not going to emulate all that's best about state ownership of infrastructure in Europe. He'd only ensure we returned to the bad old days when the unions controlled this critical infrastructure and frequently closed it down, which is in large part what led to privatisation in the first place.

---------- Post added at 11:57 ---------- Previous post was at 11:48 ----------

Quote:
Originally Posted by heero_yuy View Post
If any shananigans like that were to take place we'd deploy troops to force the companies to stay operating in the national interest.

Anyway it's not like nationalised industries don't suffer damaging strikes, remember BL were on strike more than they were making cars in the bad old seventies and British Steel was loosing £3m of tax payers money a DAY.
Well ultimately that'd be the response yes. I do have concerns about possible foreign interference with the likes of nuclear power stations but cyber attacks don't require ownership even if the technology being supplied could presumably have 'backdoors' which could be exploited by a disgruntled foreign power.

Last edited by Osem; 11-05-2017 at 11:53.
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