That was really one of the most bizarre interludes of economic policy I can think of. She was told exactly what would happen, she plowed ahead, the completely predictable happened, she then blamed those who told her not to do it because the predictable would happen.
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Ed Conway showed her a daily graph of interest rates in that interview. It clearly showed the overnight jump in rates following her budget. She doubled down.
I have a hypothesis that, to some individuals in the background quietly whispering in her ear, it all went perfectly to plan. Someone made a wedge off of this.
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Absolutely. Every time the economy takes a hit, someone makes a killing. That money goes somewhere.
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Yeah, it stinks to me. It’s well known that Truss and Kwartenng were members of a group on Tufton St.
It’s all just super shady to me. Ignoring warnings isn’t to me some blind faith, she was advised to press ahead.
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To nuke Sunak’s house? Correct.
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That’s kind of a zero cost policy as they are just letting the contracts expire.
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It improves a public service at minimal expense to the taxpayer.
Makes sense to me.
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Will it improve the rail service though?
I wans’t around before they went private, but a lot of the reports from those days indicate that they were in even worse state than they are now
I think when the trains were privatised there was also a lot of investment put into them to make them appealing prospects for investment, no? Or I might be getting confused with the water companies.
But in the case of the recent nationalisations in a similar vein, I think services have improved by and large? I can think of LNER, but I’m sure there’s another one.
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Yeah, there is a great deal of misplaced nostalgia around a lot of privatization, seemingly forgetting that you generally saw the same rent-seeking inefficiency in publicly-owned monopolies that you do in private monopolies.
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Railways are split. Network Rail manages the network infrastructure and so on, whereas the train operations were operated by private companies.
Not renewing contracts is a free win, provided you’re ready to take up the management of it. Staff just transfer over but changes to employment terms could be “fun”.
The private sector are renowned for their generosity when it comes to non-executive employment contracts.
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There is pretty reasonable evidence that, when the government had to take over failed rail franchises, the service improved. Once it was privatised again, the service became worse.
Rail is a natural monopoly. The only thing that a private company provides is shareholders.
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Privatization of British Rail was something of a bodge job. It was the one area that Thatcher’s governments had not really done much to privatize or even prepare for it. The Conservatives made privatizing rail part of their 1992 manifesto not really expecting to win that election. The 1993 Railways Bill was clearly rushed, and the underlying plan had not been really thought through effectively (over 100 companies!).
Mind you, the privatization of water was much more thoroughly planned, and look how that turned out.
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