How did they get away with privatising public services?

I do think airports need to stop charging extortionate amounts to drop off or pick up customers. I’m in Edinburgh and when I want to pick up my great aunt from the airport it costs £6, and you can’t linger, they have to be there waiting. This isn’t at all east when she’s not very good with her phone and has mobility issues. The airport trot out nonsense that it’s for environmental reasons and that they are trying to encourage people to get the bus whereas the bus goes nowhere near where we live.

Dr Beeching was appointed by the then Transport Secretary, to see how the railways could stop making losses. The Beeching report recommended large scale closures, many of which happened, though some did not, such as what is now the Mildmay line in north London. The report was flawed in many ways, especially as demand was determined by where people bought their train ticket (so holiday resorts where most people travel from somewhere on a return ticket were said to have low demand),

The Transport Secretary, Ernest Marples, had co-founded a business part of whose main line of work was building roads and motorways. One of the many dubious appointments of the government of Harold Macmillan that makes the Covid era actions seem mild on the corruption scale by comparison. Seven of Mr Macmillan's governments were his relative at one point.

Way before my time, no idea who Beeching is, I’ll take your word for it!

Post-war, the railways were in a real mess, nationalisation saved them at the time.

Scotland’s population density is such that most lines outside of the Glasgow-Edinburgh corridor, and maybe the suburban network in Glasgow and the Fife Circle could never hope to make a profit, regardless of who runs them. Had Beeching got his way in the 1960s, almost every line in Scotland would have been closed, except Glasgow - Edinburgh, Glasgow to Aberdeen via Perth/Stirling, and Edinburgh to Aberdeen via Dunfermline.

I completely understand the sentiment and the world is no doubt in a bad way, but at least some of that feeling you have is surely down to being older. You're bound to feel a lot more hopeful in your teens/early 20s taking the 70s grimness in your stride than 40 years later when you've been through more, plus mortality and all that. People almost always feel like things have got worse when they get older and like the world is coming to an end (for different reasons in each era as things change). Obviously doesn't mean it isn't worse in some ways and won't end, but there's also measures on which it's better than it's been before. But yes, less news is better for MH, especially with the overload possible today.

Just realised I wrote that entirely the wrong way round (because I was on a busy train at the time!). This person left when it was nationalised. They thought nationalisation would be a disaster. 🤣

So again this is what I’ve been told not something I know for sure but even when it was privatised the only line that made money was Glasgow to Edinburgh, every other line was loss making and subsidised by the Scottish Government.

I’ve been using the trains a lot more than usual recently and I think ScotRail do a great job.

I’m very much in the minority tho, complaining about ScotRail is a national pastime here. Try saying anything positive about them at all and people are not receptive to it.

I can’t say if public or private ownership is better because my experience is recent. And maybe service is better where I live and travel to than it is in other places.

Before Right to Buy, I’d agree that many professional people lived in council housing, and often they were the first to snap up their homes, as many were in really nice estates. Lots of lettings were quite subjective in the earlier years of council housing, before they became needs based.

In the 90s, I was a local authority housing worker in the North of England. We were giving tenancies to practically anyone who was eligible. Properties were being demolished due to lack of demand in some areas, and the Home Office leased a good number of our properties for asylum seekers. No need for hotels then.

I certainly don't absolve subsequent governments from blame.

Everyone blames this on Thatcher but therefore why have subsequent governments allowed to continue ? If you live in social housing even now there is a right to acquire as they call it, and again at a lower price than the current market valuation.

I thought this sort of thing had been stopped years ago, until our neighbours told us their son is buying his HA property.

I’ve checked Gov.uk website and it is still possible unless you’ve been declared bankrupt.

Surely when the whole country is moaning about the lack of social housing none of it should be sold otherwise we end again with a generation of pensioners in 3/4 bedroom properties after the family have left bought at reduced rates and no homes for young families.

Somebody has to be making money out of everything.

They told people it would work better, be cheaper and that ordinary people could get rich on the shares

Too good to be true , a fairy story with a happy ending for everyone so of course loads of people believed it

Ordinary people aren't noticeable better off as a result but people will belief the next fairy story all the same

But does it work very well now? The network gobbles up more public subsidy now than it ever did under state ownership.

I’m in Scotland and know someone who worked in senior management for ScotRail who left when it was privatised because they thought privatisation would be a disaster.

They also said all the old time union members liked to look back at the old days through rose tinted glasses but said it didn’t work very well back then.

I’ll emphasise - their opinion not mine.

Yes, this was a good thing. DH grew up on a mixed council estate - and his parents neighbours included lawyers, uni lecturers, business owners, teachers etc as well as posties, mechanics, shop workers and secretaries. It was a great place to grow up.

TBF restaurants and shops at airports have always been privately run, and they profiteer because it is a captive market,

British Rail was nationalised in the 1940s, when the network was on its knees after WW2. British Rail was crap because it was underfunded, not because it was state-owned. It still managed to upgrade its massive fleet of coaching stock to electric heating, electrify several key lines, invent and build the fabulously successful InterCity 125, plus innovate with things like the tilting train and merry-go-round coal trains.

And now we have "The train to London is run by company A who I believe to be overpriced and with poor customer service. I prefer to travel with company B.
Oh I can! ... but I'll have to go to Birmingham instead."

Same with water companies. The only way you can change water company is to move house.

So where were the advantages of competition supposed to come from?

@MereDintofPandiculation "Social housing was for anyone who needed a home, not for the disadvantaged. So council estates were a mixture of tenants -I knew an accountant who stayed in the Council house he'd moved into with his wife when they were first married."

As it still is in many European countries where renting is far more the norm than in the UK.

In the UK, when I was growing up on a Council estate a few decades ago I was at school with the daughter of a Cambridge professor - the family lived in a council house - and a neighbour at the end of the street was likewise a university professor. The headmaster of my school lived almost opposite us, and several teachers were on the estate. The father of another school friend was the factory manager for an international company and many of my father's friends (and the fathers of my school friends) had skilled white-collar jobs - engineers, draughtsmen, managers - while just as many were manual workers.

I was involved with Sealink so I know quite a lot about its sale. Like a number of privatisations around that time, it included many sweeteners that were non-core that could be disposed of by the purchaser to pay for the purchase of the company itself without impacting its operation. In the case of Sealink, the sale included Eversholt House, 2 British Rail golfing hotels and courses, 9 ports and their buildings, some ports included large quantities of land, 28 ships, a call centre in Ashford. The sale went through to James Sherwood of Sea Containers who very effectively asset stripped Sealink of its non-core assets clearing the entire borrowing that paid for Sealink's purchase within 18 months. The Tories attempted to fill the British Aerospace sale with similar non-core sweeteners but by that time the press had wised up to what was going on.

I don't believe it was any worse than today. The current operating standards require that 95% of trains should be less than 5 mins late. That means, on average, as a regular commuter doing two journeys a day, you would expect an average of one train a fortnight to be running more than 5 mins late. I commuted for nearly 20 years on British Rail. There were not that many delays!

The main problem was lack of information. You were left saying "shall I wait for the train to A? Or shall I go to B and take a local service to A, which will obviously take longer? Or shall I go and have a meal and see if it's sorted itself out when I come back". Everything has better information now. British Rail with better information would be as good as what we have now, with two added advantages - connections would be held back if a train was running late so people wouldn't be stranded, and if the last train was cancelled, they'd get a taxi for you.

One of the original proposals was to have railway companies bid to run each and every service, per day. So, if you caught the same train for a week, you could end up travelling with up to 7 different companies. Farcical and completely unworkable.

All of the actual evidence that you have quoted or simply made up?

I can only talk about train and bus services, but they were public and absolutely crap in the 1980s. I was in my teens and travelling regularly to see my boyfriend, and they were always cancelled / late / didn’t turn up. So tbh they were easy pickings as it was hard to see how privatisation could make them worse!

Throughout Europe, publicly-owned services run very well And in England. It's just that the publicly owned services in question aren't owned by our government,

In theory you’re correct, in reality you can make anyone redundant as long as you can justify it if questioned.