London Banter - View Single Post

JNugent

wrote:

Thon Brocket wrote:

[ ... ]

Thatcher's privatisations were mostly hugely successful. They
began a world-wide trend of successful privatisation, which
continues.
So now viable industries (telecom, airlines) survive and prosper,
provide far better services than they did under state ownership,
and generate wealth for reinvestment through dividends.
Non-viable ones (steel, coal) go to the wall. Taxpayers no longer
have to fund haemorrhaging losses on what is essentially a very
expensive dole. The employees get proper, productive jobs in
viable industries. Viable, low-cost competitors overseas employ
more people, pulling them out of the abject poverty that so
exercises lefties. Consumers at home get cheaper coal and steel.
Everybody wins.

This doesn't apply to the railways though.

It could and should.

Often they aren't viable as
private companies which must make a profit, but the service they
provide is essential.

Not to me, they aren't.

I would rather stay out of the "paying for the railways club" for that very
reason.

Believe me, I have many better alternative uses for the money.

If all the railways that couldn't make a profit
either closed down or introduced higher fares it would be a disaster.
For a start it would render all sorts of other businesses non-viable
because their workers and customers couldn't get to them.

And that's the important point, isn't it?

*If* businesses are located in places that are effectively inaccessible by
road (stand forth, the City of London), then *those employers* are the ones
who should be paying the costs of the railways that bring their employees to
them - it is for their benefit, after all.

Why should old ladies in Keighley or trainee KFC managers in Bodmin.have to
bear the costs of running someone else's business in Leadenhall Street?

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