What my train journey from hell tells us about the state of Britain

Telegraph

2 days ago

First world problems? Sure. But ORR data show just 68 per cent of trains between January and March this year ran on time. Delays are a feature, not a bug, of Britain's railways. The Tōkaidō Shinkansen, which connects Tokyo and Osaka, has a 99.5 per cent on-time performance rate. For Brits dependent on Avanti West Coast, 58 per cent of trains will be late.
The Left would have you believe that the real issue plaguing our railways is grubby corporations putting profit before customers – even though reintroduction of the profit motive to the railways led to massive investment and a doubling of passenger journeys between 1997 and 2019. The disenchanted public, meanwhile, want lower fares, and assume nationalisation will deliver them, which it won't when our maxed-out government is already paying over half of the running costs of the passenger railway. Labour clearly has no strategy, other than bringing the railways back into public ownership because unions – who will soon realise the DfT's magic money tree has been chopped down – have nagged them for years about it.
It's the same with water companies. Simple answers – nationalise, jail greedy directors, force shareholders to repay dividends – offered by those blithely unaware that the only way to improve water is to make consumers or taxpayers fund it. Private enterprise can only invest if they can charge consumers more to recoup the cost; the alternative is higher taxes – and water or rail being put into the queue behind the NHS, housing, net zero, the NHS, schools, the NHS, migrant hotels, the NHS, welfare... though perhaps just ahead of defence and prisons. We'll get another reservoir by 2120, if lucky.
'Anything that's a human right ought to be nationalised', sniffed some Green Party clown on Monday, though he hushed up when it was pointed out our supermarkets function rather well, providing cheap food in abundance. Unlike, for instance, the Soviet collectivisation which triggered mass famine. But such airhead attitudes are characteristic of a political class that believes the private sector ravages whilst the public is starved when the opposite is true.
Whoever is in charge, the lazy assumption that there is some solution to our malaise that doesn't involve trade-offs or genuinely tough choices, remain the same. Rather than put deep thought into how we modernise our Victorian water network or outdated railways, they go for the crowd-pleasing re-nationalisation.
We see this on a bigger scale with Reform. They're seen as the panacea, the party that can put everything from high taxes to crumbling public services and our defective immigration system back on track. But for now their USP is simply that they're not LibLabCon.
Their policies, such as they are, border on risible. 'The risk is that we hear much more about sizeable giveaways...while getting nothing like the same amount of specificity about the big cuts to spending on public services that would be needed for the plan to be implementable,' the IFS quietly cautioned after Nigel Farage's big speech last week.
Sadly, no one seems to be listening, in any party. They're too busy imagining more ways to spend, regulate and ban, secretly hoping they won't be the ones in power when the music finally stops.