Not sure where you live, but some of the inter-city commuter trains are a complete nonsense, where if you live in the last 3/4 stops before a main terminus you're having to wait multiple trains to get on. Add that to strikes/cancellations/repeated fare increases and people get mighty pissed off.

my virgin trains diet is london <> liverpool about 10x/year. maybe im just lucky but ive never had a cancellation. have been delayed >20mins maybe twice. i tend to travel after peak hours tho

commuter hours are spent on the tube for me so i guess thats why im missing out (tube goat)

It is a deliberate strategy to run down a public service prior to it being privatised, that's how they get away with it. Remember that after privatisation it wasn't just that trains were late, they were crashing into each other and killing people, directly as a result of private firms cutting corners and jockeying for control, and the chaos created by multiple operators. Ironically it was the state that had to intervene to make them safe again. And the idea of 'competition' is just ludicrous. You get a train to get from A to B, you don't pick the rail firm.

The same thing is happening to the NHS right now. Remember when nurses and doctors were untouchable? Not the case anymore.

That's not to say just because a service is under public control it will be perfect, obviously this depends on the levels on investment which why we need politicians who will take on the corporations and fight for greater investment.

The fundamental problem with the private sector running public services is that the risk is still carried by the state, but the profits are private. So you get obscene situations like on the railways where the taxpayer routinely bails out rail firms while the bosses take home massive profits.

I've commuted to work on them in the past and have travelled cross the country on them. Never really had an issue with them.

I mean it's a dead end industry that needs such massive investment that guarantees it will never compete with cars on a wide scale because we don't do logical connected public transport like other countries. But overall it meets expectations.

Not altogether. In the Ladbroke Grove disaster, which I narrowly missed, and in which someone I know suffered life-changing injuries, the problematic track layout and signalling were the work of the old British Rail. There were also questions over HM Railways Inspectorate and the privatised Railtrack (failure to notice ongoing problems at that location and the obscuring of signals by the overhead gantries for the Heathrow Express) and the driver-training programme at Thames Trains (whose driver failed to stop on red).

But the main problem was that ATP wasn't in place, and BR should have done that long before and didn't, because the government never let them spend that kind of money. The original Great Western, Brunel's old firm, had electro-mechanical ATP, which automatically slammed on the brakes if the train passed a red, in 1904. You read that right. 1904.

Much cheaper and simpler in the days of electro-mechanical signals, of course. As was interlocking of signals and points (which would have stopped the Thames Train ever coming into the Great Western 125's path even if it passed the red). BR still had that till the '60s, but with all-electronic signalling they just let it lapse, because money.

Well, they all know better now, government and private alike. But it took a few sudden horrible deaths to tell them.

wow you said something sensible I agree with.

Did the whole steam train ting with my dad and my son yesterday.

Interestingly now that Cornwall is filling up with everyone too scared to holiday abroad (the traffic really is ridiculous ), a lot of branch lines to big holiday towns like Padstow that were closed would make a ton of sense about now. Not sure about February.

wait, now something less sensible.

Yes in an ideal world, public transport, all transport in fact, would be free at point of use, paid for out of general taxation. That's in a world where journeys would make logical sense and people wouldn't need to commute miles to work anyway. That's also in a world where the corporate motor car lobby doesn't exist.

Right now I'll settle for full public ownership to ensure the service is run for need not for profit.

You don't see the contradiction in the tax payer forking out the bill while shareholders walk away with millions?
If they want a free market, let them have it. They'd all go under overnight. And they'd be in jail for manslaughter as they can't be trusted to regulate themselves.

You are getting so close to donning the tin foil hat

The Beeching report and cuts were a total disaster. If you ever go rural house hunting you can see a simple correlation between where people cant afford to buy and where there's easy access to a train station. So annoying when you can still see the train line and station that's been shut for decades.

British rail wasn't bad. Under-investment was bad.

I doubt Smith will win as leader but have some hope that parliament will wrestle control over invoking article 50 and/or that some consensus will form about putting the deal back to the people.

If not we shall go on to the end. We shall fight in Brussels, we shall fight on the commons and lords, we shall defend our Europe, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the benches, we shall fight on the commons ground, we shall fight in the lords and in debates, we shall keep taking the pills; we shall never surrender.

LOL fighting for the EU

You are probably right, see J.C. (aka: The Dictator) against the labour field:

I'm really not. This is pretty standard stuff, nothing in the least bit paranoid. You are naive to think otherwise imo.

Getting even closer now. Claims something completely unsubstantiated, retorts with "lol@you for not believing the same".

What evidence do you want?

Rail subsidies, lol 2013 article but whatever:

https://iea.org.uk/blog/why-are-rail-subsidies-so-high

quotes include:

"Taxpayer subsidies to the rail sector have reached astronomical levels. At £6 billion per year (including Crossrail), they have roughly trebled in real terms over the last twenty years. But the high rate of subsidy has not led to a reduction in fares, which recently have risen above the official rate of inflation."

"Since in commercial terms such projects are loss-making and would never be undertaken in their current form by the private sector, taxpayers have been forced to fund them"

privatisation kills

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/982037.stm

opening shot - "After the series of rail disasters in the past few years, there is a growing consensus - now shared by Tory transport spokesman Bernard Jenkin - that the complex plan to split to railways into 25 different companies was a mistake. "


And lastly, and I'm blaming you for making me utterly furious right now as I've just learned that Branson runs health services, Virgin Care, lol wtf is going on in this country?

"“Since Virgin took it over from the NHS, patients have had to wait up to three weeks for an appointment instead of three days, three GPs have been reduced to one, and three nurses cut to one part-time nurse. And while the company boasts about the surgery’s opening hours, often there are no clinicians present, just an open empty building. Locals complain that Virgin has “brought Third World medical standards to Kings Heath.”

Alex Nunns, Liberal Conspiracy

here - http://realmedia.press/black-box-ite...privatisation/

Horrifying stuff.


Oh and rail, also from that page, it's our friend Oliver Letwin:

‘British rail was run down for some years systematically before the privatisation. And in fact that is a standard privatisation strategy, it makes it easier.

The expert on this is Oliver Letwin MP, and he has written a nice book called ‘Privatising The World’ in 1988. And in that he sets out a number of important tactics for government who are trying to privatise public services against the wishes of their population. And among them, there are a couple of key steps. One is to restrict the budget, so that the public service gets worse and worse and worse, and then privatisation can be represented as step up, which of course in practice, generally it is not. But if you make the public service bad enough, people will perceive it that way. So it’s a deliberate policy.”



Honestly, the information is out there, you just got to know how to grab it (guess the film )

http://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/...cid=spartanntp

will I get banned for lol at this?

bolded is a pretty serious & baseless accusation. nasty piece of work this mcdonnell

lol at "undermining democracy" being a translation for "showing us up for being fools"

He's a loathsome individual.

Well, yes. I'm afraid that, when McDonnell waved Chairman Mao's Little Red Book at the dispatch box, he wasn't kidding. That really is what he's like and where he's coming from. And such people are hypocrites.

Incidentally, the Labour Party has agreed a commercial concession with Virgin Trains so that members travelling from London to the party conference will get a 20 per cent discount. (Oh, and security at the conference has been handed to a firm that runs zero-hours contracts.)

And last week Jeremy Corbyn travelled on Virgin West Coast and had no trouble getting a seat. And, in about the fourth version that Team Corbyn gave the media about the controversial journey on Virgin East Coast, Corbyn said he had in fact booked seats on an earlier train which he then proceeded to miss (which was not exactly Richard Branson's fault). Plus of course his agitprop video failed to mention that the train manager found seats for him, his wife and all his team within a fairly short time of leaving London.

Meanwhile a Branson spokesman has denied that Sir Richard is a tax exile. I take it that's on legal advice. It would be entertaining if it's a lie, but that's why it probably isn't.

That probably expresses the rule that, while the railways are still and always will be state-controlled, the cosmetic appearance of privatisation psychologically allows ministers to sanction levels of investment that they would never otherwise have agreed to.

Never mind Branson's spokesman, let's look at what Branson himself said a few years ago -

“I have not left Britain for tax reasons but for my love of the beautiful British Virgin Islands and in particular Necker Island which I bought when I was 29 years old"

According to the Telegraph -

"Sir Richard Branson admitted yesterday he had been a tax exile for seven years but denied the move had been influenced by money, rather a love affair with Necker, the Caribbean island he has owned for 34 years."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/b...s-Branson.html


So Branson likes the weather and stuff on this island he has bought. He could always pay HMRC the tax he 'owes' but chooses not to. Because he would rather keep the money for himself. He can do this because he does not live in the UK. While his employees in the UK contribute to the economy by automatic deductions from their salaries.

It would be quite weird for Branson to say he lives outside the UK to avoid paying tax. But that is what he does - he avoids paying tax because he does not live in the UK. I'm fairly confident in labelling Branson a tax exile whether he says he is or not.

Rail infrastructure was privatised for a time in the form of Railtrack - which was a disaster - so Network rail took over which is a public body.

The operators are fully privatised and it is a billion pound industry, make no mistake, Virgin and the like are doing very nicely thanks to taxpayer handouts. It is not an appearance of privatisation, the profits are very much private.

But it does expose that the private sector cannot function without a lot of help from the state. We have simply moved from a welfare state to what might be called a 'corporate state'.

Hello ladies and gents, first timer here to this thread but I thought I'd offer my tuppence on the state of the "left" at the moment.

In a nutshell, the vernacular I think is, its "ballacksed"

The labor party have a principled leader who is way to the left of the country and therefore is unlikely to win a general election. With Scotland being controlled by the SNP Corbyn has to wrestle seats from an English electorate that were unlikely in the first place to swing to Labour, (key marginals that is) and now it is extremely unlikely he will do so under his leadership.

On the other side you have the centrists who are acting like a pack of nihilist headless chickens who are predicting their own doom whilst doing nothing to stop it. Instead of fighting on policy, Mr Smith has decided to go for elect-ability.Why go for Diet Corbyn when you can have the full fat version?

I am not of the left, but I am saddened to see it so low. This country needs an effective opposition to scrutinise the next 8 years of tory excess, and it is unlikely we will get one.

What is most saddening truthfully, is that the Trots that Kinnock expelled in the eighties are slowly gaining positions of influence. The left can not be, in my opinion, a powerful force when it is fighting from the edges... Until it regains some of the middle ground , the majority of the UK will not trust them.

Also the whole, if your not for Corbyn, your a blair/brown ite..is awfully reminiscent of more ugly political historical leftist leaders.