jules wrote:Robin Summerhill wrote:I honestly don't see why the transport industry should be any different.
Because transport is a basic infrastructure service, on which all else rests. It allows the like of Sainsburys and all others to conduct their businesses, either by shipping their goods, getting their staff to work etc.
Jules
Whilst this discussion might look to an outsider that we are squaring up in the blue corner and the red corner respectively, I don't think that we are too far apart in our basic views
Something needs to be done, but I don't agree that nationalisation (ie taking back into state ownership) is a good idea. In fact, its has been shown to be a bad idea for a number of reasons:
1. It creates a monopoly which, in turn, creates an attitude amongst management & staff of, essentially, "couldn't care less" The most obvious example was in the case of the nationalised telephone service - although being only 7 years younger than me, you might not remember the days in the 70s when you couldn't get a phone line put in for love or money; when virtually every telephone box in the country was vandalised (and at this point I shall quote John Cleese: "Many people think that telephone boxes are vandalised so they don't work - the reality is they don't work so they are vandalised
). The nationalised telephone industry couldn't give a toss about customer service because nobody had any choice in the matter - you wanted a phone, you got one from the Royal Mail or went without. End of story
Now, despite what I just said, I would not say that management & staff were totally responsible for this state of affairs - somebody else was to blame too, and this leads me on neatly to the next point.
2. Government interference. Another problem with nationalised industries is that any borrowing they do shows up (or at least used to) as part of the Public Sector Borrowing Requirement (PSBR). This brought politics into the equation - every time there was a bit of a squeeze on, infrastructure projects got cancelled or postponed. It took 3 years, if you recall, between the completion of the LMR electrification between Euston, Manchester and Liverpool (which Beeching wanted to cancel, by the way, but thats another matter for a different thread perhaps?
) before authorisation was received to extend the wires north of Weaver Junction. This should have been approved during the labour administration 1964-1970 but - guess what? - there was a government spending freeze going on, during which the TSR2 got cancelled and Concorde came within a whisker of going the same way.
To bring us a little more up to date, work is currently proceeding on the Crossrail project in London. This page
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossrail#History gives you some background, and if you have a look through you will see that proposals have been ongoing for this since 1948
YES 1948 and if you read the article you will see the number of times it foundered through lack of goverment cash.
I have given two reasons up there why governments should keep their conks out of running any form of industry, but the best is yet to come
3. Whitehall interference. To fully comprehend the problems here you must first understand that the TV show "Yes Minister" was not a sitcom. It was a humourous documentary (that was written in that way to get a laugh but if you read the background to the show you will find that many of the storylines were based in truth and reality and were an actual reflection of what goes on in Whitehall) There are three basic problems with civil servants getting involved in the day today running of any industy:
a) They think they can do it better than the management
b) They can't
c) They have all the power so points (a) and (b) don't matter to them
And this is a problem we had with the nationalised BR network and still have now under privatisation. This is the matter that needs sorting out.
My rose-tinted spectacles in the early 1990s (and John Major's as well, incidentally, but the whole thing got hijacked by Whitehall) saw a return to something resembling the "Big 4" - a railway service that could serve both its users and its shareholders well, respond quickly to changes in demand and traffic flows, and not having to look over its shoulder and ask permission from the Ministry every time it wanted to blow its nose.
That is what we should have got out of privatisation. Instead of which, the structural arrangements which are making a fortune for lawyers means that the public is paying more out in railway subsidisation now than it ever did under nationalisation. But that is not an argument for renationalisation; it is an argument for letting those who know how to run a railway get on and do it.
I spent much more time on that aspect of your post than I intended to so I shall just say a brief few words on some of the other points:
"Theft of nationalied industries form the public" - there are some who say that the nationalised industries were stolen from their shareholders in the first place. There are others who say that the taking over of small railways in the 19th century by monoliths like the GWR paying sixpence in the pound for individual's shares in those companies was also a form of theft. When emotive words like "theft" are used its difficult to know when to stop or start the clock
"Is public transport a basic service? Of course it is and it should be provided for the good of all" - but has it ever been?
Ever since railways were invented there were some who could afford to use them and some who couldn't. This has nothing to do with "not wanting the working classes to be able to travel" (thats a paraphrase of something the Duke of Wellington said, IIRC), its down to pure economics. Being one of those people decribed as "empty nesters" (ie the kids have all left home) if I had a mind to I could get myself off down the station this afternoon and buy an open return ticket to anywhere in the country. Because I can afford it. 25 years ago, when my four kids were aged between 2 and 13, I would have struggled to find the brass to buy a day return to Bath for all of them. That is how it was, that is how it has always been, and that is how it will ever be.
Are you suggesting that we should subsidise rail fares so that everybody can go wherever they like whenever they like irrespective of their means? Because, if you are, you either need a means tested system in place (which itself would cost a fortune to administer) or an awful lot of people who could afford to pay the full whack would be subsidised out of taxpayers pockets, some of whom would actually be worse off than those they are subsidising. Perhaps free transport for all subsidised by the taxpayer? Same argument against applies.
I will finish with a non-railway example but it illustrates the point perfectly. Some years ago I was driving from Yatesbury to Swindon in the course of my work and got caught behind a service bus at Beckhampton that was heading for Swindon (it just beat me to it out of the Devizes road at the roundabout
) There were three people on that bus - all looked like pensioners and all no doubt using their bus passes. That bus picked up and set down no-one all the way to Wroughton. One whole bus (seating capacity 30-odd I presume) being paid for by Wiltshire County Council subsidy to take three pensioners from Devizes to Swindon. How environmentally-friendly, exactly, is that? Firstly, it would have been cheaper and less pollutiing to have bunged them all in a taxi. Secondly, there is a strong likelihood that at least some of them could have afforded the full fare but didn't need to pay it because of the subsidy of a bus pass and, thirdly, I'd put money on at least a proportion of them being drivers anyway and were only on the bus in the first place because they didn't have to pay.
