"Robin9" wrote in message
[color=blue][i]
Railsigns.co.uk;122015 Wrote:


It's very easy to spout on about recent improvements (real or
imaginary) while pretending that if BR had never been broken up and
privatised, the
railway today would be exactly the same as it was in the mid 1990s,
except that the trains and infrastructure would all have aged by
another fifteen years or so. British taxpayers like me are giving
five times as much money to the privatised rail industry as we did
to BR. Are today's passengers experiencing corresponding benefits to
justify this? I don't think so. Rail privatisation was a victory for
capitalist ideology; in all other respects it has been a spectacular
failure of scandalous proportions. The Tories won't admit it has
failed; certainly not as long as there are other public assets left
that they want to see flogged off for short-term gain.


Does anyone have any real idea of what the railway system would be
like today if it had not been privatised?

You are quite right to point out that we taxpayers are paying far more
in subsidies than ever we did when the railways were nationalised but
you are slightly off target about the privatisation. First, it was
not a victory only for capitalist ideology (or Tory dogma). It was
also a victory for spivery on a huge scale.

John Major's government knowingly undervalued the railway assets
massively and stipulated that a large percentage of the shares were to
be reserved for big financial institutions. In other words the Tory's
friends in the City were given a vast profit for doing nothing and the
British people were defauded of part of the value of their assets.

Could you be more specific on this? After all, the Roscos and Tocs were
not owned by the City institutions at privatisation, and nor was
Railtrack. So, which financial institutions exactly benefited from these
reserved shares?

On the other hand, a lot of lawyers and accountants did very well out of
the complex restructuring. They didn't buy any part of the system, but
were well paid for helping carve it up.

Major's government probably did sell it all off too cheaply, not so much
as to benefit their pals, but to make sure it all got sold off before
they lost power. They also made it as complex as possible for an
incoming Labour government to re-nationalise it. So it was ideology (and
incompetence by a tired, failing government), not spivery, at work.