Quote:
Originally Posted by Damien
I think other countries manage to invest in infrastructure despite much of it being publically owned. After all we've all got to pay for it somewhere down the line, companies aren't in the business of losing money. At least if it were publically owned the investment the government puts it gets to reap the reward of, at the moment we're in the mad case where any real investment (i.e HS2) is paid for by the government but profit will be extracted by the companies who'll give some of it back in the form of tenders.
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Yes they do but that's not ever happened here and isn't likely to hence my point. The arguments you raise applied just as much in the past as they do now and look what happened to our infrastructure. Unless you believe our glorious leaders have seen the light it'll just happen all over again but with the huge additional costs of nationalising it first.
---------- Post added at 18:05 ---------- Previous post was at 17:52 ----------
Quote:
Originally Posted by pip08456
Whoa there Osem! The rail companies fell into a decrepit state due to WWII and during that time cost thousands to repair and maintain far outstripping the revenue received from the Government for the contracts in place so much so that the only alternative was to take them into Government ownership as the companies were on the verge of going bust.
Yes, when B.R. came into existence there was an attempt to standardise everything thereby saving costs but going forward bad judgements by succeeding Governments added to the decay.
The rest about rail is for another discussion. Your post was about utilities so let's look at the rest.
Water. How many water shortages were ever declared under public ownership? How many reservoirs were closed after the utility went into private hands?
Gas. When has there ever been a shortage? OK, North Sea gas was supposed to last a lifetime (I remember the hype) but that was when we had elecricty production mainly relying on coal and to a lesser extent nuclear.
That nicely brings us to electricity. When has there ever been a shortage brought about by the lack of infrastructure or investment? You cannot include the winter of discontent under the labour party when power cuts were due to industrial action of unions.
As regards the GPO, it should never have been privatised but there was a deal done with the US that caused it which may have been beneficial to the country but we have never been made aware of.
To summarise, please explain this statement.
"the utilities, rail etc. fell into such a decrepit state after decades of under investment by government"
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Thames Water has had to spend billions on rebuilding, repairing and replacing vast amounts of infrastructure for one. There was never enough money in public hands to enable the utilities to modernise for the future, hence it was all too often put off, just like replacing all those Victorian sewers we've known for decades would need to be replaced. Keeping pace, if at all, rather than building for the future seems to me what we got under nationalisation. Yes it could and should have been different but it wasn't.
I didn't say we had frequent power cuts or shortages in the past but the lack of investment, had these things not been privatised, would by now have left us with even bigger problems. Just look at the handling of nuclear power and we're still in a state of flux with that...
I wish that it'd had been different and I do think there's a strong case for HMG having control of certain key assets/utilities but if our politicians haven't made it work well in the past why would we imagine they can/will now?