I got the impression that Rail was only privatised so Major could placate the Thatcherite nutterage in his own party. Labour had more pressing issues and didn’t want to be associated with renationalisation.
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Looking forward (not really) to the barage of lame excuses 6 years from now as to why this lie hasn’t materialised.
More or less exactly what happened. Throw it up as a promise in an election you expect to lose, then are held to it in a rushed, ill-considered process.
But hey, at least Major didn’t take the UK out of the EU…
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It would be incredible incompetence if they couldn’t make nationalisation happen the way they described it.
That’s not true.
British Trains have always been poor, but they were reasonably affordable and we got to keep and reinvest the profits.
Introduce the need to generate a profit margin for shareholders really destroyed the railways. They were still shite, but suddenly phenomenally expensive.
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I may not have been clear in my diescription, but what I ment when I said they were in a worse state than now is in terms of reliability and actual running of the service. I seem to recall in the 80’s a large number of areas would be forever dealing with trains running late or being cancelled all together which since being privatised seems to have been reduced.
I’m not sure privatisation has in any way reduced late/cancelled trains. It seems to have got worse to me.
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Empirically, that just isn’t true. There were no profits, long before privatization. All the way back to the Beeching report circa 1960, British Rail was requiring a staggering (and growing) amount of subsidy. The service cuts that @aussielad refers to began after that report, and did very little to turn it around financially.
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But they are still heavily subsidised today. That’s the myth of privatisation.
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Risk is nationalised. Profit is privatised.
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Trains should be subsidised.
They provide an alternative to cars and they provide a service for lower income people. They also provide a connection for remote areas.
An increase in train use is good for society.
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Providing they are reliable, on time and ensure that seats are more often than not available, I do agree. What I am trying to figure out is if the UK decided to renationalise the rail service, would they actually be able to provide enough trains to ensure that overcrowding is kept to a minimum, run on time and ensure they aren’t plagued by cancellations?
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There is an argument for that, true. But one cannot then turn around and make the argument ‘we keep the profits’.
Also, in the case of British Rail, the deficits that led to that 1960 report were not something as simple as a 25% coverage of ticket prices. They were erratic and escalating. One of the simple reasons why Thatcher’s governments did not get to British Rail was they simply could not understand what was going on, the system was that much of a mess.
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They will no doubt be less corrupt than the Tories, but to assume theyll be less incompetent may be stretching it.
Time will tell.
They’re not a particularly inspiring party
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Beeching didn’t help either but in other ways.
I’m trying to figure out where it ends with this type of stuff. When you look at the rising costs of running a railway and then throw in the investment needed for even just maintaining the status quo of the network infrastructure and so on you feel there’s no real way of getting anywhere near a satisfactory standard let alone a good one…
You can apply the same argument to water, NHS and so on too.
British education at it’s absolute finest 
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Or British elites at their absolute purest.