One of the reasons I'm against nationalisation, is that when the government contracts out services to the private sector it hold them to a high standard -- and regulates in lots of saftey/etc. conditions.
When the gov runs services there's a massive conflict of interest in regulating them properly: its embarrassing for the gov, there's no accountability for profitability/sustainable-use-of-resources/etc.
So whilst centrist (and center-left on some matters), I'm largely in favour of a gov which runs via contracted services with significant regulation and oversight.
Lots of cover-up stories have come out recently which show that political control over key services undermines their accountability, not improves it.
Privatisation of the rail in UK is a nightmare, the government is not holding the private sector to a high standard at all. High profit and High standard are barely compatible, I'm not sure they are even good examples in the world.
My local line / stations have been hugely upgraded over the period though I'm not sure you can put that down to privatisation. (Thameslink/Kings Cross St Pancras)
That statistic always gets used but it hides a lot of other macro trends and context. In North Irland you will see a grath that look the same without privatization.
Also lots of things that came together by privatization had been developed at BritishRail.
And anyway, it was only really private in the slights way. After just a few years networkrail had to be created. This was hugely costly and the infrastructure during the private time degraded.
After that the government had even more diect control over routes and timetables then they had under BritishRail.
Having the services themselves being run by private companies isnt all that interesting. The can only really innovate on underpaying employes and some user experiance.
And to get this part to be private, you have to have a whole army of lawyer on both sides. And then again between the service companies and the train rental companies.
The user experiance gain is completly negated by having a system that is so much harder to use in general. Every company with their own branding. Changing all the time when provider change.
Harder to do proper ticket integration and so on and so on.
Not to mention that during that period almost no new fleets were ordered so the majority of UK train manufacturing is gone. And the one that still there makes subpar trains that don't compte with the trains from France, Germany and Switzerland.
In summation, I would say privatisation didnt really save the UK much money, arguebly it cost them money.
And now privatisation is done anyway because all the franchises are simply controlled by the government anyway.
Allowing BritishRail to continue to develop into something like the Swiss SBB would have been much better for Britain.
Comming from Switzerland travling by train in Britain felt like time travling to an earlier age. There is some fancy knew stuff on the most important routes. But travling the country side in 40 year old trains and stopping at stations that look like nature was in the process of consuming them.
In Switzerland is expensive, but you get something for money. In England its expensive and so much worse in so many dimensions.
> Drivers for JR West face financial penalties for lateness as well as being forced into harsh and humiliating retraining programs known as nikkin kyōiku (日勤教育, "dayshift education"), which include weeding and grass-cutting duties during the day. The final report officially concluded that the retraining system was one probable cause of the crash. This program consisted of severe verbal abuse, forcing the employees to repent by writing extensive reports. Many experts saw the process of nikkin kyoiku as punishment and psychological torture, not retraining
A 19 year old example doesn't seem great, surely things can change in 20 years.
Also that derailment was truly caused by surpassing the speed limit, which shouldn't even be possible (even more so today). Enforcing a speed limit by block is trivial. Which it looks like is what they did after.
Japan has a very different culture and a very different way to organize and finance everything. If you want yo copy their system you cant just cherry pick a single aspect and just assume it gone work the same way.
1. Compare and contrast the privately run phase of rail service with the public version before the early 90s. It was low-use by the public and in a decrepit state.
2. The form privatisation took in the UK kept the most expensive, old, difficult to maintain etc. parts of the rail networks under public control. You saw what happened (HS2) when that public control was actually used to improve the infrastructure.
... We'll have to see what happens when MPs are suddenly setting budgets for rail companies, and whether you think you'll get what you want. I doubt it.
With 1) you're comparing apples to oranges and you're still wrong. The turnaround in rail use in the UK began in the 1980s before the private train operating companies got involved. And if you're referring to the network itself being in "a decrepit state" before and now being improved to the point where it can sustain higher capacities ... well you can thank Network Rail for that (note: not a private company). The TOCs are headed for nationalisation anyway, leaving the ROSCOs as the big privatisation "success" (in that they've extracted enormous profits while not exactly contributing anything particularly novel).
What we saw with HS2 is a large (and frankly completely necessary) engineering project getting fucked around with and repeatedly chopped down until it no longer satisfied its original plan (providing greater capacity for both local and national services by providing a new North-South line that happened to be "high-speed") and became exactly what those wielding the axe that killed it accused it of ("just a way for some to get to London slightly faster").
> We'll have to see what happens when MPs are suddenly setting budgets for rail companies
Good rail outcomes were obviously impossible under a Tory government regardless of how the control worked, but they might be possible under a Labour government. We'll have to see.
The current state of the UK water industry doesn't seem to support this theory. Privatisation has only lead to water companies like Thames Water taking on unsustainable debt while paying out billions in dividends, underinvesting in infrastructure, and polluting like crazy. Now they are demanding permission from the regulator to massively hike prices, because the foreign investment funds that own them are apparently unwilling to countenance the idea of losing any money on their investments.
Infrastructure like public transport and utilities are not, and never will be, functional markets, and regulation is always captured or ineffective in the long term. Privatisation is only a method to let financial markets pillage public goods.
Sure, I believe these dividend policies used to be illegal.
I would certainly make it illegal to do share buybacks, and to issue dividends on credit.
Privitisation doesnt really work with the private equity model that has been developed over the last decade, ie., buy a biz on credit and raid its resources.
But i think it's easier to get these laws passed than require a politican investigate resource waste, bad service, etc. in services they are responsible for. The UK gov is structured to disable accountability at every level -- that's a much harder fix.
The private sector pumps sewage into UK rivers while paying billions in dividends to their global investors.
Then when the government tries to reign them back in the excuse is their company is "neither financeable nor investible" without customers footing the bill. No shit, it was loaded with debt and money syphoned out of it for 30 years.
Well "the gov" does run the system in Scotland. Scottish Water, which didn't suffer privatisation, ticks over nicely - providing high quality service at low cost and reinvesting any profits.
You're inventing a hypothetical nightmare scenario while ignoring a very real and positive one because it's inconvenient for your "privatisation = good" argument.
How would the government be able to hide that? There is oversight of the Treasury by the OBR and there is more than one political party in the UK, opposition MPs happily point out all the failures of the party in power.
My view is that it is easy to accuse government services of being dysfunctional because there is far MORE transparency than for private companies. Bankrupting a water company can happen in plain sight by a private company because money that was supposed to be used to, you know, build a functioning sewage system is fed through a maze of offshore accounts for years.
Not really true. National Rail, which owns the tracks is a quango, not a private company. The actual train operators are truly privately owned but it is important to understand that they are not privately making any major strategic decisions about the network, just maintaining the rolling stock and providing staff; their routes, times, prices, and profits are mostly set by the state (with some narrow room for discretion) and not by the private sector.
Much better answer than mine. Also worth mentioning they don't even own the rolling stock - that's the ROSCOs and tbh that's probably where the profit is to be made.
At the start the railway infrastructure was also privately owned (Railtrack), but that collapsed after less than 10 years and became National Rail. This was a sign of the failure to come.
There are a mountain of restrictions on the franchisees because having an interconnected system of railways with the management of different parts delegated to separate private companies makes no logical sense.
The only way it makes sense is as a vehicle to extract wealth from the state and the people (ticket prices); and transfer it to the private owners of the franchises, and the private professional services companies via all the consultancy fees and red-tape the system generates.
Owning rolling stock is where it is at now for wealth extraction. As far as I know this is not something that is going to change with the current plans to expire franchises and bring the management back into public ownership.
> when the government contracts out services to the private sector it hold them to a high standard
PPE Medpro?
The fundamental problem with this kind of neoliberalism is that if you don't trust government to manage something directly, then outsourcing it doesn't help, because the management oversight still has to be done, but now it happens indirectly.
It only works if you can have an actual market with actual market forces. What tends to get built is a "fake" market, where instead of individual service users picking their preference you get a tendering process. The rail tendering process is a fake market: the trains are owned by ROSCOs (banks), the rails are owned by the state (Network rail) because the private operator skimped on safety then collapsed, and the TOCs transfer all their staff through TUPE every time the franchise changes. All that changes is the livery.
Specifying through contract is a lot less efficient than direct management (see Coase, theory of the firm). This is why Tube privatization failed; they got up to hundreds of thousands of pages of contract before realizing it wasn't going to work.
When the gov runs services there's a massive conflict of interest in regulating them properly: its embarrassing for the gov, there's no accountability for profitability/sustainable-use-of-resources/etc.
So whilst centrist (and center-left on some matters), I'm largely in favour of a gov which runs via contracted services with significant regulation and oversight.
Lots of cover-up stories have come out recently which show that political control over key services undermines their accountability, not improves it.