Chris

The historic problem with nationalised British corporations has been their debt sitting on the Treasury’s balance sheet. It’s a recipe for short termist political interference in operations - a classic example being British Rail’s APT fiasco. The train was rushed into service under pressure from Thatcher’s treasury which wasn’t prepared to put any more money in or wait any longer for necessary troubleshooting. Cue press runs in which the unready train made its passengers sick and headlines it never recovered from.

BR sold its patents to Fiat, which used them to improve its own developing tilting train technology. Today, that technology is cruising up and down the West Coast main line, where the APT briefly operated - it’s used on Virgin (now Avanti) Pendolino trains, which were designed and built in Italy and are used across Europe.

Direct government influence over state owned industry also hands far too much political power to trade unions, as Arthur Scargill and his predecessors ably demonstrated. Mick Lynch of the RMT presents a cautionary tale of where we could all too easily end up - he has been desperately trying to politicise his dispute for months. The government has been wise to resolutely refuse to get involved.

If we’re to re-examine the role of state owned utilities in the UK then the whole political culture around them has got to be radically different than in the past.