The Labour Government

[Postman Pep]

I think that puts to bed whether or not it was an inside job or not. Good people we have running the country, again.

...and whether Wes Streeting is a **** or not.

Elsewhere on the unsurprising news front

 

[kaz7]

Exactly that kaz.

Read the breaking news and then the NCA link I pasted.

Ta will read it properly tomorrow

 

[TinFoilHat]

...and whether Wes Streeting is a **** or not.

Elsewhere on the unsurprising news front

DFT were meeting my companies directors today.

Told them to make cuts in management and will only fund "front line customer and operational roles"

Gaffers have called the union reps in tomorrow to "discuss the future of the buisness"

With a Blairite in charge of it I don't know what to expect.

Sounds ominous...

 

[blueinsa]

Labour to “take back control” of the back log of visa applications by rolling out the e-visa the previous lot brought in.

When asked how much it will cost like yesterday with the nationalisation of the trains, the question was dodged but fear not, it’s all part of the “plan for change”.

 

[metalblue]

At least we did actually get new Blair / Brown hospitals unlike those 40 new Liar Johnson hospitals.

TBF some new hospitals are getting built, others that were due to have funding allocated next year have been put on hold as Reeves works out how to pay for them or not.

Johnson’s problem was he pitched new services as new hospitals so rightly got ridiculed. If he’d have said 12 new hospitals and 38 new centres of excellence (or whatever the numbers were) I don’t think the public would have been any more or less impressed.

 

[metalblue]

DFT were meeting my companies directors today.

Told them to make cuts in management and will only fund "front line customer and operational roles"

Gaffers have called the union reps in tomorrow to "discuss the future of the buisness"

With a Blairite in charge of it I don't know what to expect.

Sounds ominous...

I suppose it depends if you think there are too many managers. “Workers” generally do as they don’t see the stuff management does usually.

 

[metalblue]

You’re really against this ?

Privatisation has been a disaster for our rail industry

TBF BR wasn’t some great bastion of joy, it was a shit show. The privatisation of rail was badly done, I think the tories just got giddy about privatisation of anything that wasn’t nailed down and created neither a privatised business nor a national one and it ended up failing everyone.

I think taking it back in to national control and learning from the lessons of the past is sensible. If this is just driven by ideology then we’re all a bit fucked and I fear it’ll just become another distraction for governments going forward, particularly given they can’t run the shit they are currently responsible for terribly well.

 

[inbetween]

TBF BR wasn’t some great bastion of joy, it was a shit show. The privatisation of rail was badly done, I think the tories just got giddy about privatisation of anything that wasn’t nailed down and created neither a privatised business nor a national one and it ended up failing everyone.

I think taking it back in to national control and learning from the lessons of the past is sensible. If this is just driven by ideology then we’re all a bit fucked and I fear it’ll just become another distraction for governments going forward, particularly given they can’t run the shit they are currently responsible for terribly well.

The privatisation of the train system hasn't worked I agree and companies have taken unwarranted profits as a result I agree but that is where the correlation ends.

We will not be able to nationalise the train franchises and then the removal of 'profiteering' suddenly fixes the system. The only benefit of nationalisation really is to make things more efficient through centralisation. There could be a more flexible workforce by working as one company for example although naturally the unions will be against anything that improves efficiency or flexibility.

You only have to look at the DfT last resort operator, it made £2.2bn last year however only achieved £20m profit across 4 operators, it's not exactly a lucrative business. The profits come from subsidies but DfT isn't going to subsidise itself so all it will do is save money and that is bound to be absorbed as savings for something elsewhere.

If we want a properly working system then we need to invest in it, that means putting in far more money than is extracted as profit and unfortunately I'm not sure where that's going to come from. The idea that we will just nationalise the franchises and then suddenly have a perfect system with cheaper ticket prices is just lunacy.

The reality is the TOCs will be wound up and we'll get the same service at the same price and the Treasury will then absorb the revenues. Whether further investment comes is a political choice for Labour, if they don't do it then it's unlikely that things will change much.

They're going to fix the leaking station roof by changing the manager of the station.

 

[Kompany Car]

TBF BR wasn’t some great bastion of joy, it was a shit show. The privatisation of rail was badly done, I think the tories just got giddy about privatisation of anything that wasn’t nailed down and created neither a privatised business nor a national one and it ended up failing everyone.

I think taking it back in to national control and learning from the lessons of the past is sensible. If this is just driven by ideology then we’re all a bit fucked and I fear it’ll just become another distraction for governments going forward, particularly given they can’t run the shit they are currently responsible for terribly well.

If they would have had the brains to keep the rolling stock and infrastructure together rather than splitting them it might have worked. Instead you get train operators saying that the infrastructure is not up to standard with claims right left and centre.
The way rail projects are funded is also garbage. There have been loads of projects started, stopped, modified, restarted then stopped again over the last 5 yrs. All wasted money with no improvement and more cost. The projects once they complete the feasibility stage should have funding to completion, not for each discrete stage.

 

[metalblue]

The privatisation of the train system hasn't worked I agree and companies have taken unwarranted profits as a result I agree but that is where the correlation ends.

We will not be able to nationalise the train franchises and then the removal of 'profiteering' suddenly fixes the system. The only benefit of nationalisation really is to make things more efficient through centralisation. There could be a more flexible workforce by working as one company for example although naturally the unions will be against anything that improves efficiency or flexibility.

You only have to look at the DfT last resort operator, it made £2.2bn last year however only achieved £20m profit across 4 operators, it's not exactly a lucrative business. The profits come from subsidies but DfT isn't going to subsidise itself so all it will do is save money and that is bound to be absorbed as savings for something elsewhere.

If we want a properly working system then we need to invest in it, that means putting in far more money than is extracted as profit and unfortunately I'm not sure where that's going to come from. The idea that we will just nationalise the franchises and then suddenly have a perfect system with cheaper ticket prices is just lunacy.

The reality is the TOCs will be wound up and we'll get the same service at the same price and the Treasury will then absorb the revenues. Whether further investment comes is a political choice for Labour, if they don't do it then it's unlikely that things will change much.

They're going to fix the leaking station roof by changing the manager of the station.

I agree largely with this. The profit motive isn’t a bad thing in itself, it [supposedly] enforces efficiency however the railway workforce is heavily unionised and isn’t always prepared to change practice in the name of efficiency often citing safety which may or may not be valid.

Once we bring it all back under national control we will get some benefits from the economies of scale but fundamentally nothing changes and all the structural problems remain - however a least we can have an honest conversation about it. If we want an efficient, punctual, cheap rail network we need to be prepared to heavily subsidise it. My guess is no one will be prepared to have that conversation with voters and we will just run the current broken system even further in to the ground with regular strikes and it becoming an election point scoring tool.

 

[metalblue]

If they would have had the brains to keep the rolling stock and infrastructure together rather than splitting them it might have worked. Instead you get train operators saying that the infrastructure is not up to standard with claims right left and centre.
The way rail projects are funded is also garbage. There have been loads of projects started, stopped, modified, restarted then stopped again over the last 5 yrs. All wasted money with no improvement and more cost. The projects once they complete the feasibility stage should have funding to completion, not for each discrete stage.

Yup, breaking it up was a nightmare decision. Once Labour have boxed it up again they can sell it off properly next time ;)

 

[MillionMilesAway]

I agree largely with this. The profit motive isn’t a bad thing in itself, it [supposedly] enforces efficiency however the railway workforce is heavily unionised and isn’t always prepared to change practice in the name of efficiency often citing safety which may or may not be valid.

Once we bring it all back under national control we will get some benefits from the economies of scale but fundamentally nothing changes and all the structural problems remain - however a least we can have an honest conversation about it. If we want an efficient, punctual, cheap rail network we need to be prepared to heavily subsidise it. My guess is no one will be prepared to have that conversation with voters and we will just run the current broken system even further in to the ground with regular strikes and it becoming an election point scoring tool.

Why would the govt subsidising the railways be unpopular?

 

[remember arthur mann]

Why would the govt subsidising the railways be unpopular?

It would be very popular, if the privatised bloodsucking tentacles were removed first.

 

[hampshireblue]

I agree largely with this. The profit motive isn’t a bad thing in itself, it [supposedly] enforces efficiency however the railway workforce is heavily unionised and isn’t always prepared to change practice in the name of efficiency often citing safety which may or may not be valid.

Once we bring it all back under national control we will get some benefits from the economies of scale but fundamentally nothing changes and all the structural problems remain - however a least we can have an honest conversation about it. If we want an efficient, punctual, cheap rail network we need to be prepared to heavily subsidise it. My guess is no one will be prepared to have that conversation with voters and we will just run the current broken system even further in to the ground with regular strikes and it becoming an election point scoring tool.

You refer to unions. Unions are made up of workers,the likes of you and me. They are established to represent the workers and get their mandate from those workers. "Regular strikes" are not because of the workers, they are more often because of sh*t management.

 

[threespires]

We have struggled with the strategy for our national infrastructure ever since the immediate post war period and the choices we made about where our Marshall Aid went.

You can look at the approach in the later 20th century as either a brazen sell off of the family silver for the enrichment of the few or as an attempt to somehow magically recover the ground we lost as a result of those post war decisions. I suspect it was a bit of both depending on which politicians you are talking about. Either way we've had one 'strategic' attempt at playing catch-up and it failed miserably, so where we are now there really isn't a magic wand to address 70+ years of atrophy. We really need (a) some cross party consensus on priorities beyond an election cycle and (b) to stop doing stupid things - so I'm not getting my hopes up! Maybe if Labour does manage two-terms it can at least establish a pattern of not doing stupid things and create some sort of consensus around priorities, probably more chance of the former than the latter.

I sometimes wonder if we had said after WWII "f**k it we simply can't afford to be a world power anymore folks" where we would be now as a country? It was certainly discussed as I think Keynes, who was chief economist to the government at the time, laid out the choices available to us fairly starkly. I suspect the reality is even had we not chosen it for ourselves we'd have been coerced into it by our allies because the ability of the Soviet Union to exploit the vacuum we'd have left would have been viewed as entirely unacceptable certainly to the US.

 

[metalblue]

You refer to unions. Unions are made up of workers,the likes of you and me. They are established to represent the workers and get their mandate from those workers. "Regular strikes" are not because of the workers, they are more often because of sh*t management.

What’s the got to do with my post?

But as you’re on the subject, public sector workers are about 500% more likely to go on strike than private sector workers. Shit management you say?

 

[metalblue]

We have struggled with the strategy for our national infrastructure ever since the immediate post war period and the choices we made about where our Marshall Aid went.

You can look at the approach in the later 20th century as either a brazen sell off of the family silver for the enrichment of the few or as an attempt to somehow magically recover the ground we lost as a result of those post war decisions. I suspect it was a bit of both depending on which politicians you are talking about. Either way we've had one 'strategic' attempt at playing catch-up and it failed miserably, so where we are now there really isn't a magic wand to address 70+ years of atrophy. We really need (a) some cross party consensus on priorities beyond an election cycle and (b) to stop doing stupid things - so I'm not getting my hopes up! Maybe if Labour does manage two-terms it can at least establish a pattern of not doing stupid things and create some sort of consensus around priorities, probably more chance of the former than the latter.

I sometimes wonder if we had said after WWII "f**k it we simply can't afford to be a world power anymore folks" where we would be now as a country? It was certainly discussed as I think Keynes, who was chief economist to the government at the time, laid out the choices available to us fairly starkly. I suspect the reality is even had we not chosen it for ourselves we'd have been coerced into it by our allies because the ability of the Soviet Union to exploit the vacuum we'd have left would have been viewed as entirely unacceptable certainly to the US.

Winning a war isn’t always financially beneficial. It took 2 world wars to wipe out our wealth that had taken over a 100 years to build.

 

[metalblue]

Why would the govt subsidising the railways be unpopular?

I didn’t say it would be. I said the government won’t test the hypothesis by asking voters to pay more tax. If they were confident of that position Sunak, Reeves, Starmer et-al wouldn’t have denied any intention of upping taxes.

 

[TinFoilHat]

I suppose it depends if you think there are too many managers. “Workers” generally do as they don’t see the stuff management does usually.

The railways has plenty of bullshit management jobs. They usually have a title of 'special projects - Department name.

The special project was usually acting as a firewall for the decision the real boss above them made.

 

[metalblue]

The railways has plenty of bullshit management jobs. They usually have a title of 'special projects - Department name.

The special project was usually acting as a firewall for the decision the real boss above them made.

Haha, well you might see it as a pointless job mate but the big cheese sees it as invaluable to keep the hordes from his door. It’s all about perspective ;)

Not sure how old you are but did you work in the railways pre privatisation, and if so did you ever see a culture change once it was privatised?