Thursday 25 April 2024
Let's repeat the HS2 success story
Labour denies railways will be given 'lower priority' under renationalisation plans - as Tories warn of 'wildcat strikes'
Shadow transport secretary Louise Haigh promised to deliver the biggest shake-up to rail "in a generation" by establishing the long-delayed Great British Railways (GBR) organisation and bringing routes back into public ownership, if Labour forms the next government...
Sam Coates, Sky News' deputy political editor, asked Ms Haigh how she was going to avoid the "trap" of British Railways - the former national railway system that was privatised in the 1990s - which was forced to compete for central government cash.
"How are you going to make sure that you don't end up falling into the same old trap as British Railways, where effectively, to get train upgrades, you are competing for cash with schools and hospitals, and given money is going to be very tight, aren't the trains actually going to be a lower priority?" he asked.
Labour knows it isn't going to work, GBR cannot compete successfully with the budgetary demands of the NHS, education and other loud voices on the political stage. It isn't going to work and Labour knows it. We may as well assume that there is an internal calculation suggesting that enough voters don't know it, particularly younger voters.
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8 comments:
Government by Epicycles. Ancient astronomers used epicycles to explain the wandering motion of planets in the geocentric model of the universe. But the geocentric model was wrong to start with.
In principle a well run business or service can be viewed as a virtuous circle. The product is made or the service delivered, the customers pay money for it, and the money feeds back into producing the next product or delivery. But the principle is faulty as there are to many disrupting factors to regard a circle as an ideal model.
However, the virtuous circle is often disrupted by unforeseen events and develops a wobble. In this case a franchise driven rail systems is disjointed so a new epicycle, Great British Railways, has been proposed to pull things together.
Labour also intend to do this but propose to control wobbles in this new epicycle by adding another epicycle - a new independent watchdog called the Passenger Standards Authority. This too will wobble so no doubt a further epicycle will be added in due course - a Standards Guidance Council or some such beast.
All that will be achieved will be a distancing of central government from blame and plenty of jobs.
There is a serious problem with younger voters, which is that they can't remember a time when things were different from now. Explain the Seventies and the 3-day week to them, and they would think it sounds great compared to more rule by the Tory scum they have been taught to despise. Lots of middle-aged remainers were like that: deeply conservative due to fear of what they don't personally know.
Have you noticed how Labour are keen on enfranchising 16 year olds and recent immigrants?
My father was a lowly worker for British Railways. He and his fellow workers had open contempt for the bosses. Once a year the Senior Manager would arrive on a special carriage to peruse our little corner of the total system. Nothing had changed since the previous year, Which was good. Then off back to civilisation with a few bevvies.
They could not make the railway or the associated ferries make an honest profit. Would not invest in increased capacity of new technology.
The service was crap. Dirty, unreliable, expensive.
Revived now it would assume its rightful place among those other bastions of public service - BBC, NHS, Education, HMCR,.....
The whole things so false, AKH, like a nightmare we hope is false.
"...there is an internal calculation suggesting that enough voters don't know it..."
I'm sure that is right. For a certain sort of leftish middle-class lazy thinker, the answer to all problems is to nationalise, because then you've got access to the magic money tree, and as everyone knows, inadequate funding is the cause of all issues with everything.
As Sam says above, most voters now have no memory of nationalised railways.
DJ - central government does distance itself from blame and also from the possibility of embarrassment. This seems to be one reason why Net Zero is so dangerous because inevitably there will no motive to row back unless it can be done quietly. This is what seems to be going on now with renewed interest in nuclear power. Another epicycle perhaps.
Sam - yes, enfranchising 16 year olds must slightly reduce average voter age and personal experience. Might also have the effect of inserting more junior propagandists into the family.
Doonhamer - decades ago my mother used to work in what I think was a regional railway office in Derby. She described a room full of typists with nothing to do and a used ticket storage system where nobody knew why used tickets were being stored. She left after a very short stay.
James - yes it's horribly false, a nightmare where we can't wake up.
Peter - it's still a surprise to see leftish middle-class lazy thinkers accept this kind of thing, apparently without any effort at critical analysis. As if they never realise they are being manipulated in a way which should shame them but doesn't.
God rot British Rail. Except:
(i) The lunches in the dining car on the London train. Distinctly pleasant.
(ii) The young woman with the trolley who sold tea and pies on the platform at Carlisle. Top pies! Though I suspect she was a capitalist not an employee.
dearieme - my last experience of rail travel was commuting. Not particularly unpleasant, but the return journey was usually standing room only and there were no pies.
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