This piece of mine on the shocking rise in Britain’s rail fares, appears on the Guardian’s Comment is Free website.
Neil Clark: The latest price increases show Tory serial privatisers got it very wrong in the 90s. Join the protests to put things right
“Whichever way one looks at it, privatisation is a giant asset-stripping process. It is a very efficient way of taking money out of taxpayers' pockets". Gwyneth Dunwoody, the Labour MP who uttered those words during a debate in parliament on rail privatisation in February 1995, deserves some sort of posthumous New Year honour for calling it exactly right.
While Tory ministers claimed that selling-off the railways would bring "benefits to passengers and taxpayers", and scoffed at opposition concerns, the latest above-inflation price increases in Britain's rail fares – already by far and away the highest in Europe – shows once more that the serial privatisers of John Major's Conservative government got it very, very wrong.
You can read the whole of the article here.
2 comments:
We need to renationalise the railways, uniquely without compensation in view of the manner of their privatisation, as the basis for a national network of public transport free at the point of use, including the reversal of bus route and rail line closures going back to the 1950s.
Only public ownership can deliver this. Public ownership is of course British ownership, and thus a safeguard of national sovereignty. It is also a safeguard of the Union in that it creates communities of interest across the several parts of the United Kingdom. Publicly owned concerns often even had, and could have again, the word "British" in their names.
This is not on topic but has anyone noticed what has been going on in Hungary recently ? It seems as though there is much opposition on the streets to Orban's government.
Whilst some might be genuine some seems to involve leading members of the former MSZP, a form of designer protest to protect neoliberal "reforms". I'll find out and investigate more when I arrive in Debrecen on Wednesday.
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