Comments on: Giving Away the Crown Jewels

By: Drewski

Drewski — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 02:36:36 +0000

The UK has a crappy recent record with rail improvements, at least compared to France, Spain, Switzerland and Germany. The West Coast Main Line has been billions of pounds over budget, and services in London and the Southeast are decades behind Paris or large German cities. Even something as relatively simple as a tunnel to connect the terminii for the third-rail services south of the city, so they could be through-routed–nope, study everything, over and over, and do nothing. Crossrail is a joke compared to the S-Bahn in Berlin or Zürich, let alone comparison with Paris. The UK has spent 30 years doing everything possible to square a circle. Yes, ridership has rebounded, but the backlog of improvements is the longest in Western Europe, and UK fares are the highest in Europe. Considering that gas has been running a good $8 a gallon for the last few years, it’s stunning that it can still be more expensive to take the train than to drive. It’d be great to blame the lack of investment on Thatcher-era ideology, but it’s far more down to New Labour and its love for the public-private partnership. These things have very nearly bankrupted NHS trusts which used them to build new hospitals; somehow, the government knew that the real costs of PPP would routinely be a third higher than stated, yet it would be the NHS trust forced to cover the shortfall from its own resources. (A similar thing happened in suburban Toronto, when the Ontario government entered into a PPP to build the new hospital in Brampton, and the borrowing costs inflated the price by 30%.) The UK is stuck in a strange bizarro-world: instead of government investing in the country’s infrastructure, now there always has to be some angle, something that drags the private sector in. The LCR case is textbook–here’s the government using the private sector as a middleman, guaranteeing a profit to the private-sector partner, which means that not only is the taxpayer paying for the investment, but the taxpayer is also paying guarantee a profit margin to a private company. There is no sound economic reason for this, and if it costs more money, it either requires higher taxes or it increases public debt. It’s a racket, and in the UK, it’s become an obstacle to public infrastructure investment.

By: Nathanael

Nathanael — Wed, 20 May 2009 06:38:32 +0000

This one’s a godawful mess. The British government isn’t even getting the “infrastructure branch”, and that branch doesn’t even own the critical station, St. Pancras. So this is even *worse* than the rest of the semi-privatised rail system.

In the rest of Britain’s rail system, the government, through fully-government-owned Network Rail, owns all the track and all the stations; only the trains and the running of the trains is privatized. This appears to work tolerably well, and private track ownership (“Railtrack”) was an unmitigated disaster.

For the donation of an amount equal to the entire cost of building the line, the government should damn well have gotten ownership of the line. This is just corporate welfare.

By: Sean

Sean — Sun, 17 May 2009 03:14:12 +0000

What a shame. Privatization of infrastructure is a bad idea and should be discarded. Unfortunately, we have seen corporations doing the same thing in the U.S. Chicago under Daley has become an auctioning center for infrastructure be it expressways, parking garages, or airports.

This is all part of the plan under conservative governance- neglect infrastructure and starve the government of the funds needed to maintain it then use the poor state of infrastructure and the expense of improving it as an excuse to sell it to a private entity. Democrats have been a part of this plan as well because they aren;t very different than the GOP when it comes to transportation and economic policy.