Labour pledges to re-nationalise railways - Is it time for utilities too?

[Startingagainandagain]

I am glad to see that Starmer is finally announcing some more radical policies and this is a positive step as far as I am concerned.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/renationalise-railways-labour-election-starmer-b2534505.html

I would like to see water, gas and electricity to be brought back into public ownership too, considering the profiteering, lack of investment and the sewage scandals that privatisation gave use.

I am old enough to remember the times before privatisation and I think that a big part of the cost of living crisis comes from private companies trying to squeeze as much profit out of us.

Also with climate change I think we also need to bring natural resources into public ownership.

There are more important things to be nationalised first like employment. The state should provide suitable employment for anyone who is unable to find it themselves.

Yup, the morning shift can dig the hole and the afternoon shift can fill it in.

I'd far rather they started with water. The way Thames Water is going, it's only a matter of time before we have a typhoid outbreak in London.

Safety of the general population must come first, and Thames Water are a dangerous disgrace. Their board should be in jail, or at the very least banned from holding directorships.

Back to East Germany/North Korea

Or Roosevelt's New Deal.

The Works Progress Administration employed 8.5 million people, mainly men, between 1935 and 1943.

So we have the devil or the deep blue sea, private sector corruption or gvt run corruption.
Surely there are ways to mitigate the down sides of these options?

I'm fed up of our absolutely shit and yet breathtakingly expensive railways but unfortunately people who remember nationalised rail didn't think they were any good either

I think it’s immoral for something vital for life like water to be owned privately for profit and also a security risk if anyone eg unfriendly country can control it. I would like to see our rivers seas and lakes be clean and fit for humans and wildlife.

Also with rail surely we cant keep expanding the number of cars, building more roads. We should have a subsidised public transport that is fast clean safe and efficient - other countries seem to manage it so it is possible.

''@LittleLegsKeepGoing
Re-nationalising energy would be a financial cluster fuck of epic proportions because only a small amount of the assets/companies are actually British owned (from memory only British Gas, OVO and Octopus). These are the only ones that the government can literally seize with minor implications. ''

Then I assume that if the government at least nationalised these British companies and then offered customers decent prices then it would be a case of customers voting with their feet and the remaining privately owned company would either go bust or have to offer more competitive tariffs too..

The issue at the moment is that there is little competition/choice and that they all charge ridiculous prices and work together as a cartel to squeeze as much money as they can out of us.

Thames Water first, please!

They should start with water. Even the US has publicly owned water.

Scotrail was renationalised already- doesn't seem to have made any difference to services, but very hard to find any data on this which is odd given that the government took over in 2022. Drivers striking over pay has been an issue and some services have been cut.

They've already taken over Northern Trains. No improvements at all, in fact it just gets worse.

"Northern Trains, trading as Northern, is a British train operating company owned by DfT OLR Holdings for the Department for Transport (DfT), after the previous operator Arriva Rail North had its franchise terminated at the end of February 2020."

Network Rail is another Govt owned company that controls and maintains the infrastructure. As is LNER, Transpennine, Southeastern, and ScotRail.

So basically, probably over half of the railway companies are already owned by the government.

Not sure what Starmer thinks he's going to achieve? Presumably just trying to win votes by assuming enough voters don't know that the government already control/own the railways!!

This. It seems that many people here have no idea what nationalisation actually involves.

Look at how bad many of our public services are run, HMRC, the justice system. Folk are living in cloud cuckoo land if they think nationalisation is the answer

Yeah- in principle I'm not against nationalised power generation utilities (although I think it's a far less compelling argument if you assume generation will be close to 100% renewables in 20 yrs vs mainly FF now) but the cost and logistics of it make it a non-starter. I'm not sure how they would even start to, say, buy BG back from Centrica. Presumably Centrica can just say no.

A good move would be to stop foreign companies owning the utilities and making their profits from the UK to subsidise their local customers.

I think nationalising water should be the priority

Indeed, while its reputation during the 1970s was probably deserved, by the 1990s it was running as a competent, lean business. If it had been given the sort of funds available to the privatised railway, we'd have a much better system.

Look how many councils are bringing buses & trams back under public control. It will mean that the stupid system where you can buy several single tickets for a journey cheaper than one for the whole trip will be got rid of & if they can stop the cancellations & late trains they will be onto a winner. Look at how railways are run in Europe, ds went interailing last year & said the trains right through were brilliant, everything ran to the minute, they were clean, fast, well run & modern. We could have a service to rival it.

Lot of nonsense being talked on this thread. There's a bizarre assumption that it's somehow 'natural' for certain enterprises to be owned and operated by the government. Why?

The era of rail nationalisation lasted less than 5 decades (an aberration in the overall history of rail) and was an era of chronic failure. The service was abject and passenger numbers declined hugely.

What examples are there of the government being a model of efficiency (or even vague competence) when it comes to running anything? Most of the rhetoric is just kneejerk denunciation of anything that dares to be so successful as to make a profit.

Overcharging and relying on government handouts isn't really profitable. In the last decade, the train companies have had £75.2 billion in subsidies, according to Hansard.

They won't re-national utilities water or mail.

Really pleased to see this from Labour. Yes I’d rather they started with water, and I’d like to see more utilities nationalised (challenging though that’d be) but it’s finally a more bold policy from Labour, in the direction a lot of Labour voters would like to see them go, hoping it’s the start of a little turn in direction and a bit more ‘policy courage’.
(Yes British Rail wasn’t great in a lot of places, doesn’t mean it has to be that way again if this does happen, it works very well in many other countries so why not look to them for inspiration rather that what our government has done in the past. Possibly idealistic, but so what.)

I don’t trust the government to be able to run anything tbh. Plus I don’t use trains that much so don’t care. You can’t tear me away from my car.

And I think government money could be put to better use than buying out private energy companies.