Caporegime
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I thought GD was doing well for a few hours, discussing actual policy.
Now we're back to name calling opinions
Now we're back to name calling opinions
Poll: Poll: Prime Minister Theresa May calls General Election on June 8th
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Why does it matter? I mean so long as there is competition for those contracts...
I was replying to a previous post, sorry I offended you by insulting a politician. You do know there's the Speakers Corner sub forum if you don't want to hang around with the riff-raff?
Caporegime
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Ok, you seriously can't differentiate between:
Railways being bought back under state ownership once the current contract with private companies expire, and profits directly funding investment
And
Private companies, owned by foreign states, not investing adequately, raising prices year on year and then taking any profits back to their own county
?
Railway operators yes, the tracks are government owned.
The issue that if you are going to have the railway operators state-owned (as is the case for about 50% of journeys now apparently)...wouldn't it be better to the British railways operated by the British state, rather than the money UK commuters spend being used to pay dividends to the French, German, Dutch, Spanish, and Hong Kong governments?
evidently you've failed to read the previous posts - the distinctions are rather obvious though some of your premise there perhaps isn't so accurate:
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Couldn't someone earning 20 or 30k afford a 0.1% increase. Why top load everything.
Its clear Brexit is going to shaft the country, the people voted for it, almost everyone should help.
Though better management would also help.
I don't see why it would - why would removing competition lead to an improvement? I wouldn't be opposed to having a British state owned operator competing too. What I would be opposed to is no competition and a state monopoly on the whole thing.
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What competition. Its not like I can take a different companies train if I wanted.
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not you can't necessarily, that doesn't negate that there is competition
(actually on some routes you can take different companies trains or indeed different routes to between the same cities - for example London Euston -> Birmingham via London Midland (slow) or Virgin (fast) and Marylbone -> Birmingham via the Chiltern Line)
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Hold on, so having investment if it comes from a foreign Government is automatically bad? So I guess BT shouldn't be allowed to have investment from T-Mobile since they're German, or Orange, since their French?
What about having Ikea? That's not allowed because they're Swedish?
What about having Ikea? That's not allowed because they're Swedish?
Soldato
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I am not saying we should over tax the rich, i am saying more tax should not be the answer to every budget problem. If we always think collecting more money is the solution to not having enough, then we will never come to the conclusion that maybe better spending is the answer. There are a number of areas where poor money management has been ignored in favour of blaming one party or another cutting the budget. Every election we hear one party saying xxx should pay more or yyy's should be paid less. It is reform in the upper levels of the NHS and restrictions in the housing market that we need to tackle. Let's talk about taxing 20k earners more AFTER doing things like reducing the cost of living by targeting the rent/housing market, public transport.
A few % pay rise would be incredibly easy to swallow for low income earners if things like rent was more reasonable.
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The train companies get to own the easy bits - ticketing, driving, staffing, etc - without owning the hard bits - rolling stock, track, maintenance. They don't deal with any of the real liabilities. It's an absurd halfway house and not true privatisation in any meaningful sense. That's why it doesn't work. They can dick around with their money and hold a monopoly position - what other train company am I going to use for a journey on the west coast main line? - and never deal with any of the tough problems.
You posted something but didn't actually answer the question. In fact you've criticised what you see as a smaller instance of a monopoly that these individual operators have. Why would a larger monopoly that removes any competition improve on that?
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The criticism is of the halfway house first and foremost. If you're going to privatise, do it properly. However, first ask yourself why you're privatising. The big argument that always comes up is competition. Well, you can't have competition on a railway line. Virgin can't compete with GWR because I live in the North West, not the South West. I can't wait for a franchise to run out when I need to make a journey next week. It's a sham. The companies promise some fanciful nonsense and get awarded a contract for 15 years or something, get subsidised up the arse by the taxpayer to pay huge bonuses to some idiot at the top and never deal with any of the real difficulties of running a rail network.
The same is true of energy. It makes no sense to privatise energy companies when energy is fungible and they're all selling the same thing from the same places distributed with the same infrastructure. What value do they add? A different letterhead? It's nonsense.
Nationalisation of the pulic transport system is in theory a great idea. However,
Currently the system is subsidised by the taxpayer in addition to the fare paying traveller. The current aim of government is to transfer much of the taxpayer subsidy to the passenger. Under a nationalised scheme, the whole risk is borne by the government (read taxpayer) and a populist government aiming to keep fare increases low could increase the taxpayer liability.
Of course it is argued that 'profits' would be repatriated to the taxpayer via government. This never really worked in the past so why would it in the future. The accounting would be internal by the civil service, never cheap. The rolling stock and infrastructure improvements would be subject to ministerial review and again overseen by Whitehall.
Lastly a quango replacing current operators would be required to 'run' the entire system.
There is probably a better way to run the railways, but a full nationalisation is not one of them.
Currently the system is subsidised by the taxpayer in addition to the fare paying traveller. The current aim of government is to transfer much of the taxpayer subsidy to the passenger. Under a nationalised scheme, the whole risk is borne by the government (read taxpayer) and a populist government aiming to keep fare increases low could increase the taxpayer liability.
Of course it is argued that 'profits' would be repatriated to the taxpayer via government. This never really worked in the past so why would it in the future. The accounting would be internal by the civil service, never cheap. The rolling stock and infrastructure improvements would be subject to ministerial review and again overseen by Whitehall.
Lastly a quango replacing current operators would be required to 'run' the entire system.
There is probably a better way to run the railways, but a full nationalisation is not one of them.
Do you think it is preferable for British railways services to be run by the British government, with profits retained by the UK treasury, or do you think it is better that Deutsche Bahn runs British railway services, and profits from them are sent back to the German government?
That is what happens right now.
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