Thatcher to be given a state funeral

[simmo]

I always marvel at the sheer cheek of the public utilities sell off.

It's a bit like looking after a mates house while they go away on holiday. While he's away you advertise all his prized possesions in the friday ad, without consulting him first. Better still, you use his money to pay for the advertising ( just ask Sid ). When he comes back you give him back the pittance you got for it all, minus the cost of advertising of course, and tell him, it's for the best in the long run.

Bloody genius !

I would say it is more like this.

You have a state run business, it is the only one of it's kind in the country, so there is no competition for any customer to go to, therefore the business can offer the most abysmal standards that it wishes without any fear of losing any customers. Because it is abysmal only domestic customers use it, international customers will not touch it with a bargepole. It becomes a huge bloated organisation that has a ridiculous number of employees that just gets filled with staff that many in real terms do nothing, it is also union dominated and they demand ever more unrealistic pay demands for these staff members and so it runs at a greater and greater loss, and you as the governement and the country has to keep on bailing it out.

Do you sit back and watch these type of businesses draining your money??

Or do you privitise it, by doing this you get quite a few benefits. You get the initial injection of cash from the sale as eventhough it runs at a loss it still has assets, thus private investors will believe they can turn it aound. Private investors if they turn it around will eventually have to pay yearly taxes on profits. If they are not succesful the company will fold and you as the government are not obliged to bail it out.

Also and more importantly competition is allowed to compete with it. This means to say that other companies can potentially offer better services at lower prices thus creating competition in that sector. If a customer is not satisfied with his level of service he has a choice to go elsewhere meaning that all potential companies in this industry are compelled to compete for customers.

Think how many phone companies there are now in the Britain vying for your land line/mobile business 30 years ago there would have only been one BT! Surely a customer having a choice between one and many is better.

 

[Dick Knights Mumm]

I see. Like water I suppose.

 

[El Presidente]

Surely a customer having a choice between one and many is better.

Agreed, just shame that they are a greedy cartel who still rip off the consumer so we have to have the EU wade in to regulate prices for mobile phones whilst abroad though.

 

[Herr Tubthumper]

This means to say that other companies can potentially offer better services at lower prices thus creating competition in that sector. .

This doesnt always happen though. Lower prices often means corners are cut, standards drop. Look at Railtrack.

There are plenty of ways to run utilities in an efficient manner whilst still under public ownership. It doesnt just boil down to either state or private business.

Take SNCF. Brilliant cheap, modern, widespread, easy to use. 51% government owned I understand. Whatever way you look at it Britain has failed. The nationalised rail service was poor...the privatised service worse and rediculously expensive. Why cant we ever do anything right in this country?

 

[Herr Tubthumper]

Agreed, just shame that they are a greedy cartel who still rip off the consumer so we have to have the EU wade in to regulate prices for mobile phones whilst abroad though.

I remember 7-8 years ago when text messaging (to the detriment of calls) increased dramatically and all of a sudden the 4 main networks doubled the prices. I remember thinking at the time it was suspicous. 4 years later they were all fined. Bravo the free market and competition eh.

 

[Herr Tubthumper]

all potential companies in this industry are compelled to compete for customers. .

...competition. Ah yes, BA dirty tricks. The petrol and mobile phone cartels.

 

[simmo]

This doesnt always happen though. Lower prices often means corners are cut, standards drop. Look at Railtrack.

There are plenty of ways to run utilities in an efficient manner whilst still under public ownership. It doesnt just boil down to either state or private business.

Take SNCF. Brilliant cheap, modern, widespread, easy to use. 51% government owned I understand. Whatever way you look at it Britain has failed. The nationalised rail service was poor...the privatised service worse and rediculously expensive. Why cant we ever do anything right in this country?

And hugely subsidised by the State to pay for the cheaper fares.

 

[simmo]

...competition. Ah yes, BA dirty tricks. The petrol and mobile phone cartels.

So the choice of one is better for you than the choice of many.

You are in a minority of one there!

 

[simmo]

...competition. Ah yes, BA dirty tricks. The petrol and mobile phone cartels.

You just pluck out companies names.

Yet lets talk about the airline industry. How many different airline industries are there in the UK? Why do you think you can travel to continental Europe on a plane for £49 for example, because Ryanair, Easyjet etc. etc are competing for your and all of our business. If there was one state owned airline, why can't it not charge £349 for it. You have nowhere else to go.

Also if you don't like a particular company like BA, for whatever reason, you don't have to use them.

 

[Nemesis]

And hugely subsidised by the State to pay for the cheaper fares.

Anything wrong with subsidising public transport systems?

 

[Lord Bracknell]

And hugely subsidised by the State to pay for the cheaper fares.

Of course.

Not because French Railways are "inefficient", but because France, as a nation, recognises the value to the nation as a whole of a well funded, low cost public transport system - something that Thatcher considered had no value whatsoever.

Some public services are a GOOD THING and should be "subsidised" because of the benefits that they bring to everyone.

 

[simmo]

Anything wrong with subsidising public transport systems?

Anything wrong with it operating as a viable business? Why should it operate at a loss? Why is it operating at a loss? Overstaffing? Excessive pay demands of unions?

If it is always subsidised by the taxpayers why does it need to change any of this?

 

[London Calling]

Or with SNCF, the TGV's you have the world envy of the best railway system, that is intergrated with bus networks and is so good that the Austrians, Swiss, Spanish etc do deals with you to allow your trains to run into their countries.

That you have modern, stations, staffed and pleasant. That you are still developing your system, introducing more modern trains and lines in the last 10 years than Britain in the last 100 years. When was the last time we built a new train line in the UK?




And where is the competition with water, none.

With gas and electricity, basically the lower the price, the lower the service.

What we have in Britain with telecommunications is not necessarily the result of privisation but the EC Directives to open up the state markets.

BT in particular did not need to be a state run industry, telecommunications were a far cry from the time it was nationalised but it should have been sold off at the price it was worth, not at a subsidised rate to the investor. We can't have subsidised industries but we don't mind the investor getting a cut price deal.

f***ing joke.

 

[simmo]

Or with SNCF, the TGV's you have the world envy of the best railway system, that is intergrated with bus networks and is so good that the Austrians, Swiss, Spanish etc do deals with you to allow your trains to run into their countries.

That you have modern, stations, staffed and pleasant. That you are still developing your system, introducing more modern trains and lines in the last 10 years than Britain in the last 100 years. When was the last time we built a new train line in the UK?




And where is the competition with water, none.

With gas and electricity, basically the lower the price, the lower the service.

What we have in Britain with telecommunications is not necessarily the result of privisation but the EC Directives to open up the state markets.

BT in particular did not need to be a state run industry, telecommunications were a far cry from the time it was nationalised but it should have been sold off at the price it was worth, not at a subsidised rate to the investor. We can't have subsidised industries but we don't mind the investor getting a cut price deal.

f***ing joke.

Japanese trains and services are far better for starters.

Do you ever go to continental Europe by plane? How much does your plane ticket cost and why do you think the prices are so low? Not just in real terms but in actual terms the prices are lower than 30 years ago. Why is this?

 

[Barrel of Fun]

What was the state of our rail network when Maggie inherited it and did we have the financial capacity to invest in it?

 

[Nemesis]

Japanese trains and services are far better for starters.

Do you ever go to continental Europe by plane? How much does your plane ticket cost and why do you think the prices are so low? Not just in real terms but in actual terms the prices are lower than 30 years ago. Why is this?

By Andrew Grice
Monday, 9 June 2008


The Government has been urged to abolish a £10bn-a-year "hidden subsidy" to the airline industry to bring it into line with hard-pressed motorists struggling with higher petrol prices.
Although the aviation industry claims it is being badly hit by the soaring price of oil, it still enjoys a double boost denied to drivers because it does not pay fuel duty or VAT on the fuel for its planes. New figures suggest this subsidy is worth £9.92bn at current levels of fuel tax.
The proposal will be strongly opposed by airlines, which have already warned that passengers face surcharges of £30 a ticket this summer because the cost of aviation fuel has doubled in the past year.
With hauliers and fishermen protesting that their livelihoods are at risk and motorists feeling the pinch as the economy slows, the Liberal Democrats argue that the airlines should no longer get special treatment.
"This is a massive public subsidy for an industry that is one of the fastest-growing contributors to climate change," said Norman Baker, the party's transport spokesman, whose written Commons questions revealed the scale of the perk. "Ordinary motorists continue to pay fuel tax, so why should aviation continue to be exempt?"

 

[Storer68]

I would say it is more like this.

You have a state run business, it is the only one of it's kind in the country, so there is no competition for any customer to go to, therefore the business can offer the most abysmal standards that it wishes without any fear of losing any customers. Because it is abysmal only domestic customers use it, international customers will not touch it with a bargepole. It becomes a huge bloated organisation that has a ridiculous number of employees that just gets filled with staff that many in real terms do nothing, it is also union dominated and they demand ever more unrealistic pay demands for these staff members and so it runs at a greater and greater loss, and you as the governement and the country has to keep on bailing it out.

Do you sit back and watch these type of businesses draining your money??

Or do you privitise it, by doing this you get quite a few benefits. You get the initial injection of cash from the sale as eventhough it runs at a loss it still has assets, thus private investors will believe they can turn it aound. Private investors if they turn it around will eventually have to pay yearly taxes on profits. If they are not succesful the company will fold and you as the government are not obliged to bail it out.

Also and more importantly competition is allowed to compete with it. This means to say that other companies can potentially offer better services at lower prices thus creating competition in that sector. If a customer is not satisfied with his level of service he has a choice to go elsewhere meaning that all potential companies in this industry are compelled to compete for customers.

Think how many phone companies there are now in the Britain vying for your land line/mobile business 30 years ago there would have only been one BT! Surely a customer having a choice between one and many is better.

try living withiout clean water.

and 30 years ago B.T. didn't exist. Telephones and the wireless telegraphy service (thats telexes and telegrams to you) were the responsibity of the It was the General Post Office (GPO). BT didn't come into being until 1980 (as a division of the GPO) prior to privatisation

With the invention of the telephone by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876 the GPO began to provide telephone services from some of its telegraph exchanges. However in 1882 the Postmaster-General, Henry Fawcett started to issue licences to operate a telephone service to private businesses and the telephone system grew under the GPO in some areas and private ownership in others. The GPO's main competitor the National Telephone Company emerged in this market by absorbing other private telephone companies, prior to its absorption into the GPO in 1912.

The trunk network was unified under GPO control in 1896 and the local distribution network in 1912 . A few municipally owned services remained outside of GPO control. These were Kingston upon Hull, Portsmouth and Guernsey. Hull still retains an independent operator, Kingston Communications, though it is no longer municipally controlled.

In 1969 the GPO, a government department, became the Post Office, a nationalised industry separate from government. Post Office Telecommunications was one of the divisions.


[edit] Formation of British Telecom
The British Telecom brand was introduced in 1980. On 1 October 1981, this became the official name of Post Office Telecommunications, which became a state-owned corporation independent of the Post Office. In 1982 BT's monopoly on telecommunications was broken, with the grant of a licence to Mercury Communications.

 

[Storer68]

What was the state of our rail network when Maggie inherited it and did we have the financial capacity to invest in it?

it was bigger, cheaper to run

After 2001, the situation deteriorated as we had the Hatfield train accident which reduced passenger revenue, and led to a massive programme of – often unnecessary – work on the railway to ensure that there was no repeat. In addition, the cost of building High Speed One is lumped into the statistics making them look worse, and so in the past three years, subsidy has been around the 50 per cent mark, historically very high. Network Rail’s spending, set by the last regulator, Tom Winsor, has been very high and is only reducing slowly. Moreover, that does not show the right position because Network Rail’s borrowing is not included. That has been increasing at around £2bn per year and, will clearly never be paid back. At some stage it will be consolidated into the government’s accounts and therefore it should really count as subsidy.

All of this suggests that the subsidy for the railways is a political issue which the government does not want to address honestly. The real comparison with the past should be with the height of the Lawson boom twenty years ago when railway usage was at a historic high. It is again, today, thanks to the unprecedented period of economic growth. Yet, unlike then, railway subsidy is at a historic high which the government now says it wants to reduce. The reasons, as regular readers of this column will know, are structural. The so-called privatised railway – which is in effect subject to far more state interference than at any time in its history – sucks up huge wads of money in a way that is largely unaccountable, thanks to its Byzantine structure.

In order to reduce subsidy levels as set out in the White Paper, the government is banking on the economy continuing to grow and consequently franchise support reducing dramatically, along with the end of investment in High Speed One. It is a heroic assumption. Should the Brown boom collapse, the railway finances as set out in the White Paper will be completely unsustainable.

The East Coast franchise won by National Express recently continues this pattern. The rates of revenue growth underlying the premium payments, which increase at an around annual £50m each, are in the same ball park as those which Sea Containers could not meet, around 8-10 per cent annually. While excess revenue or heavy losses are shared with the Department, reducing National Express’s exposure, it would only take one Hatfield or 7/7, less alone a serious economic downturn, to make these figures unachievable.

Oddly enough, history is almost repeating itself. In the White Paper on P145, there is a table showing franchise payments are supposed to fall from the their current level of around £2bn to £535m by 2014. Ten years ago, there a similar pattern was predicted. The 1997/8 annual report of the Office of Passenger Rail Franchising (the body that preceded the Strategic Rail Authority) has a table which shows that franchising costs were due to fall from £1.9bn that year to £650m by 2003/4. The similarity in numbers (which of course ignore inflation, direct payments to Network Rail and changes in track access charges) is rather uncanny. And what happened? Actual payments in 2003/4 were around £2bn. Several things went wrong in between – the collapse of Railtrack and the deal to upgrade the West Coast Main Line which scuppered the numbers relating to the two Virgin franchises, various franchisees finding they could not meet the reductions in subsidy because BR had been more efficient than they realised and, most notably, the disruption caused by the 2000 Hatfield accident which affected performance and therefore revenue. But, as the expression goes, sh*t happens and one thing is certain, we will not get through to 2014 without something going wrong. Then this strategy of squeezing the franchisees and pricing people off the railway will not look so clever.

 

[Storer68]

I would say it is more like this.

You have a state run business, it is the only one of it's kind in the country, so there is no competition for any customer to go to, therefore the business can offer the most abysmal standards that it wishes without any fear of losing any customers. Because it is abysmal only domestic customers use it, international customers will not touch it with a bargepole. It becomes a huge bloated organisation that has a ridiculous number of employees that just gets filled with staff that many in real terms do nothing, it is also union dominated and they demand ever more unrealistic pay demands for these staff members and so it runs at a greater and greater loss, and you as the governement and the country has to keep on bailing it out.

Do you sit back and watch these type of businesses draining your money??

Or do you privitise it, by doing this you get quite a few benefits. You get the initial injection of cash from the sale as eventhough it runs at a loss it still has assets, thus private investors will believe they can turn it aound. Private investors if they turn it around will eventually have to pay yearly taxes on profits. If they are not succesful the company will fold and you as the government are not obliged to bail it out.

Also and more importantly competition is allowed to compete with it. This means to say that other companies can potentially offer better services at lower prices thus creating competition in that sector. If a customer is not satisfied with his level of service he has a choice to go elsewhere meaning that all potential companies in this industry are compelled to compete for customers.

Think how many phone companies there are now in the Britain vying for your land line/mobile business 30 years ago there would have only been one BT! Surely a customer having a choice between one and many is better.

try living withiout clean water.

and 30 years ago B.T. didn't exist. Telephones and the wireless telegraphy service (thats telexes and telegrams to you) were the responsibity of the It was the General Post Office (GPO). BT didn't come into being until 1980 (as a division of the GPO) prior to privatisation

With the invention of the telephone by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876 the GPO began to provide telephone services from some of its telegraph exchanges. However in 1882 the Postmaster-General, Henry Fawcett started to issue licences to operate a telephone service to private businesses and the telephone system grew under the GPO in some areas and private ownership in others. The GPO's main competitor the National Telephone Company emerged in this market by absorbing other private telephone companies, prior to its absorption into the GPO in 1912.

The trunk network was unified under GPO control in 1896 and the local distribution network in 1912 . A few municipally owned services remained outside of GPO control. These were Kingston upon Hull, Portsmouth and Guernsey. Hull still retains an independent operator, Kingston Communications, though it is no longer municipally controlled.

In 1969 the GPO, a government department, became the Post Office, a nationalised industry separate from government. Post Office Telecommunications was one of the divisions.


[edit] Formation of British Telecom
The British Telecom brand was introduced in 1980. On 1 October 1981, this became the official name of Post Office Telecommunications, which became a state-owned corporation independent of the Post Office. In 1982 BT's monopoly on telecommunications was broken, with the grant of a licence to Mercury Communications.

 

[simmo]

By Andrew Grice
Monday, 9 June 2008



"This is a massive public subsidy for an industry that is one of the fastest-growing contributors to climate change," said Norman Baker, the party's transport spokesman, whose written Commons questions revealed the scale of the perk. "Ordinary motorists continue to pay fuel tax, so why should aviation continue to be exempt?"

Well seeing as who is talking we all know now that it is has got to be true!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I am surprised he didn't talk about the in flight steak and kidney pies being subsidised as well!

Is there no subject that this man talks any sense on?