Martin Edwards wrote:

Peter Masson wrote:
"Martin Edwards" wrote
How about Grantham? That would annoy the old bat.

If we'd had a PM in the 1980s who had a positive rather than negative
outlook on railways (and who did not think instinctively that any French or
German policy was by definition nuts) we might have got a HSL from London to
Birmingham and Manchester instead of the WCML PUG, which would have been
much better value for money.

Peter


I'll drink to that.


Either there is a misunderstanding of political history here, or someone
is trying to rewrite it.

The government that was in power for the whole of the 1980s was about as
benign towards the railway as any postwar administration has been.
No-one dared privatise the railways - it was widely viewed by the Tory
party as a privatisation too far.

The problems started in 1992, when the Tories were unexpectedly
re-elected with John Major as leader. The idiot had some misplaced
fondness for the days of the "Big Four" pre-1948 and allowed the
arch-privatisers to dismember the very successful Sectorised BR and
sell it off.

The same sort of assumptions that led to the Poll Tax debacle were
allowed to pass unchallenged when it came to privatising BR. The same
mistakes were made, and we have been paying a high price for them ever
since.