Quote:
Originally Posted by jfman
Remarkable transformation? Where?
Underinvestment is the first play of the privatisation handbook. It's hardly surprising that the Conservatives let it rot before saying the best option was to sell it. Same goes for the NHS now.
The alternative is to make people pay via the tax system. Pay over the counter, pay through tax, either way you pay. There's no philanthropic medical insurance providers out there, just as there aren't with train operators.
---------- Post added at 19:42 ---------- Previous post was at 19:40 ----------
You've been asked to evidence that it's a Marxist agenda and had your original post amended for failing to do so.
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Now now ... the rail network suffered underinvestment consistently under both main parties for its entire period of national ownership. This wasn’t a nefarious Thatcherite plot to justify selling it off. The civil service managed the network like an outpost of empire, destined to fade to nothing. ‘Managed decline’, they called it.
The government has indeed thrown buckets of cash at the network since it was privatised, but the addition of TOCs and ROSCOs to the dynamic has brought in private investment on top of that, that would not otherwise have been available to the railway.
The model under which the railway network is now operated is far from perfect but I don’t believe profit is an inherently dirty word. You give someone an incentive to work for and they do a better job. That’s just human nature. We might as well live with it.
(Written from my seat on a Virgin Trains Pendolino, which brought tilting trains to the west coast main line with private investment where state funding tried, and failed).
