Ok..I admit it...rail privatisation was a disaster and the last Conservative Government made a mistake. It was not a mistake to privatise it but it was a mistake to use the method they did to privatise it. I heard on the radio this week that in fact fares will have in real terms fallen during the ten years of privatisation, whereas they rose by over 100% in the ten years before privitisation.
I still believe though that the real mistake was made by the post war Labour Government that took state control of the railways from the private sector. Name me a single industry that thrived and is still in existence from those awful dark Labour days after the second World War? Even the health service, created at the same time, is not thriving and educational attainment has stagnated.
Tonight though I faced the nightmare we commuters face from time to time. It rained - and therefore the trains have to stop running. I admit it rained a fair bit and there was flashing and thundering, but in the 21st century do the public services, private or public, really need to stop because of rain. Tonight a twenty minute journey took almost two hours. A fellow commuter was rung by their partner and the partner clearly asked where were they? Their reply was "in hell". That is what it is like in our cattle trucks they call trains. Yet the Government sets targets for reliability and punctuation - what about comfort? We all need to lose weight, but does my rail ticket include a proportion that is dedicated to causing me the most discomfort by sweating it off in a coach load of poor commuters?
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