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Comment by selfhoster11 | Hacker News Reader

It's not inevitable, but the current government appears to move in that direction intentionally.

- The EU exit was, among other things, accused of being a way to relax regulation and legislation to degrade product standards to a US-like level. Chlorinated chicken was a big item on everyone's discussion agenda a while back. This is now evidently happening.

- The government is severely underfunding the NHS, despite paying it lip service. Some accuse the government of doing this as a form of sabotage, so that the service quality degrades and the private sector can swoop in as the saviour. This is controversial because:

a) Brits are very proud of the NHS as a nation (or at least that's the dominant narrative in my news bubble)

b) The privatisation of British rail has been a disaster - ticket prices have skyrocketed, and service quality took a nosedive in some areas.

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> The privatisation of British rail has been a disaster

Train company profits count for about 2% of the total cost of the ticket, and (pre covid) the network carried more than twice as many passengers as it was under BR - nearly 2 billion journeys a year vs a steady 800m in the 70s through 90s. in terms of distance, pax-km

1970 36b 1980 35b 1990 40b 1997 42b (end of BR) 2010 64b 2018 81b

Since 1997 that's a 90% increase.

France has increased 40% since 1997, Germany by 60%.

Fares have increased, but this is a reflection of the cost shifting to the passenger and away from the taxpayer. In 2009/10, franchised train operating companies were paid £275m to run the services (and another £3b was spent on the network those trains run on)

By 2015-2016 that operating subsidy had gone, and instead the TOCs paid £1.2b/year to operate their trains (some areas like Northern and West Midlands were still subsidised, but South West trains and Southern were paying their operating dues and paying for the tracks they run on)

It doesn't make sense to justifiably complain about overcrowdning (high demand) on one hand, but complain about high prices on the other. There is competition to rail if the price was too high -- driving, coaches, flying, not traveling, but the fare is obviously at the right level to result in record levels of travel and relatively low subsidy.

I'm not sure where you're getting your figures from. Here's a more representative view:

https://fullfact.org/economy/how-much-does-government-subsid...

Government subsidies have tripled since privatisation and fares have risen by 20% after inflation.

That doesn't seem like a win for efficiency. And of course it's the customer who bears the cost - which aren't just economic, but also social, because good public infrastructure reliably offers many-multiple ROI for economic activity in general.

And the question remains - how would BR have fared (ha...) with those generous subsidy levels instead of the very constrained resources it was forced to operate with?

Not only has privatisation been very expensive and poor value in real terms, it also destroyed one of the UK's biggest engineering employers and R&D development cultures.

The HS125 is still one of the most popular trains today. Experimental APT tilting technology was given away to European companies and then sold back to the UK in the form of foreign-built tiling trains.

Those could easily have been designed and built in the UK. There were also losses in signalling research - essential for maximised efficiency - and in network integration.

So it absolutely does make sense to complain about overcrowding and high prices when a nationalised network would have been cheaper to run, better value, and also more advanced technologically.

Of course this ideologically unpossible. Even so. Ideologues need to explain why jobs were lost, safety was trashed, engineering and R&D skills were off-shored in addition to higher subsidies and uneconomic fares.

Those specific figures come from the sheet "Rail subsidy per passenger mile by Train Operating Company (TOC): DfT franchised train operators: 2015/16"

Note this importantly doesn't include Scotland, Wales, Merseyrail (public) or TFL (public)

Rail subsidy jumped after railtrack was replaced with nationalrail, and the legacy of decades of underfunding in rail under BR was apparent. That underfunding is obviously going to happen under a tory government interested in cutting short term costs. You can see that as of 2015 subsidy per passenger mile was about the same as it was in the 80s and 90s[0]

Rail subsidy is split into two parts

1) Track costs 2) Service costs

Your figures are including major capital expenditure - specifically HS2 and Crossrail, so not really comparable with subsidies in the 70s and 80s when there weren't massive capital programmes and expansion.

I'm less concerned about track maintenence costs or track capital costs -- that's like the government paying for road maintenance or new motorways - it's good. It's the service subsidies that interest me. Basicalyl how much is the taxpayer using to subsidise rail travellers (who tend to have higher income and higher wealth than average), and during the 6 years I have data on, those dropped by £1.4 billion.

Remember that under BR there were competing sectors - intercity, regional railways, network southeast, all of which were shit. Now there are competing franchisees, some of which are shit, but we often get a choice (Virgin vs Chiltern vs London Midland for London-Birmingham, XC vs TFW for Crewe-Bristol, etc. This means more choice and cheaper fares for me, the passenger).

In 2015/16 the franchise "GTR (Thameslink etc)" pays £278m for the privilige of running trains through central London. Meanwhile Northern, which have very few routes that pay their way, get paid £122m from central government. You could argue that Grant Shapps would be better running these services, I'm not convinced.

Effectively Brighton->London commuters are subsidising rural travellers in Yorkshire. You could argue this shouldn't happen, and those commuting into London for high paying jobs should have cheaper fares, at the expense of fewer services in the North. That's a very Thatcherite view, but that's ok, everyone's entitled to a view.

APT predated privitisation by 2 decades so I'm not sure what that has to do with anything. Virgin ordered the class 390s.

It sounds like you don't like the state of the rail industry in Britain in the 80s and 90s, which is reasonable. It's hardly the fault of privitisation didn't start until 1993 and didn't begin operation until about 1997

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_privatisation_of...

> Train company profits count for about 2% of the total cost of the ticket

Considering that this is about the same as inflation and less than the usual annual ticket price increase which is decided in part by the government, I strongly suspect that this number is an accounting exercise more than anything else.

There's also the profits made by the trains leasing companies as many TOCs lease their rolling stock

> There is competition to rail if the price was too high -- driving, coaches, flying, not traveling

There's no real competition for most commuters around London at least. The trade-off is rather with the cost of housing.

It makes perfect sense to complain about overcrowding for that reason and because pay a lot of money for their tickets, indeed.

People commute by train because it's the least bad option and/or the only viable option. That does not mean that it's good or that there is real competition.

If the number of trips has been increasing I think that the main drivers are the concentration of jobs within London and the booming housing costs: People live further and further away and have to commute by trains.

Yes, the leasing companies make a fortune. On the other hand they take risk in tying up capital.

I'm no fan of the franchise system - especially when companies like Virgin East Coast get out of the obligations if they don't make enough money, but rail is stronger now (well 2019) than it has been since before the motor car was created, and the strength coincided with the franchise system coming in.

> People commute by train because it's the least bad option and/or the only viable option. That does not mean that it's good or that there is real competition.

We haven't seen the same growth in other European countries though. And it's not just commuting into London -- long-distance travel has ballooned too - hence the need to build HS2.

> We haven't seen the same growth in other European countries though

In cities like Paris, public transport has huge capacity and is cheap (and in Paris employers have to pay half your season ticket).

Lower growth there does not mean that we're doing better, it means that we're starting from lower... And the UK has had a robust population growth as well.

> in Paris employers have to pay half your season ticket

That sounds awful - so I effectively get a paycut if I walk or ride to the office?

I don't understand how you can interpret it as either awful or a paycut if you don't take public transport...

If you buy a season ticket (at least a monthly ticket) to commute between your home and office you send a copy to HR and they have to refund you half of it.

That sounds like a massive incentive to hire very locally!

It's cheap enough that employers don't bother (and anyway it's usually not possible to...). So, no, it's not a "massive incentive".

I'm not sure train leasing is a profitable as a it was when BR was privatised and Porterbrook et al owned all the rolling stock

What seems to happen now is the manufacturers e.g. Hitachi lease the trains to TOCs complete with maintenance plans built it.

Think Eurostar was the first model of this in the Uk

> "b) The privatisation of British rail has been a disaster"

Privatisation has not been perfect, but only someone who does not remember the old days of British Rail in the 1980s and 1990s would consider it a disaster. It's true that fares are high, but service levels and passenger numbers are both far above the British Rail days. (UK rail passenger numbers reached an all time record in 2019)

Prior to Covid, many of the busiest lines were operating near their capacity limits, so setting fares any lower would just cause even more severe crowding. And fares, of course, generate revenue to reinvest into expanding capacity.

In any case, UK rail operators are now de-facto nationalised due to Covid. This has been recognised by the ONS, with rail operator's debts now counted on the government balance sheet.

ONS recognises full nationalisation of the UK railways: https://www.ft.com/content/1baa6b50-47ba-416e-b172-90a77a34c...

> Prior to Covid, many of the busiest lines were operating near their capacity limits, so setting fares any lower would just cause even more severe crowding.

This isn't the vindication of privatisation you seem to think it is. Passenger numbers (and fares) are hitting records, and the operators are still using the exact same rolling stock as in 'the old days of British Rail'. Privatisation has led to massive corporate profits at the taxpayers' expense, without providing the investment the railways need.

How is it that half of the UK's private operators are subsidiaries of other countries' nationalised operators? When the East Coast Mainline was renationalised (after the franchise holder claimed it was impossible to run profitably), it jumped from the most expensive line with the least customer satisfaction to the line with the highest customer satisfaction.

The 'bad old days' of British Rail were because of persistent underfunding, not the ownership structure. The UK state spends more on railways today under a privatised system than they did when the entire system was nationalised.

https://www.bringbackbritishrail.org/

> and the operators are still using the exact same rolling stock as in 'the old days of British Rail'

Some are, some aren't - Cross Country had plenty of new rolling stock when they were Virgin owned, and GWR have replaced many of the 125s in the last 5yrs

> "This isn't the vindication of privatisation you seem to think it is."

I'm not suggesting it is. I'm saying that privatisation has not been a disaster, which was the OP's claim. If privatisation was a disaster, passengers would not have flocked to the railways in record numbers.

> "the operators are still using the exact same rolling stock as in 'the old days of British Rail'"

This isn't true in the vast majority of cases. With very few exceptions (like a few remaining HSTs), you'd be hard pressed to find any train operating into London that dates back to British Rail. Many routes have been through multiple rolling stock upgrades since the BR days!

But note that rolling stock is not something that the operators have much control over anyway. Upgrades are decided/determined by the Department for Transport as part of the franchise terms. So if you do find yourself on an ancient train on some regional route, that's really the government's fault, not the operator's.

> "How is it that half of the UK's private operators are subsidiaries of other countries' nationalised operators?"

Nationalised operators tend to have low costs of capital, so can potentially bid lower for franchises than private competitors who are likely to be paying higher interest rates. They also already have management experience in running large railways, which helps to support their bids.

> "The 'bad old days' of British Rail were because of persistent underfunding, not the ownership structure."

I think this is partially true.

> "The UK state spends more on railways today under a privatised system than they did when the entire system was nationalised."

Yes, but again, passenger numbers have increased dramatically in that time. In 2019, the UK's total rail subsidy (including Network Rail spending) was 3.97p per passenger mile. That's just about as low as it's ever been since at least 1980.

Here's a well-sourced rebuttal to your statement that privatization benefits revenues: https://youtu.be/DlTq8DbRs4k?t=591

TL;DW revenues and passenger numbers are demonstrably lower with privatization than when nationalized. Unlike other industries, the UK's franchise privatization model is not subjected to free market forces, allowing rail companies to win contracts by underbidding only to fail to meet their targets.

It's a bit unfair to compare to that era of British Rail when at that point it had been run into the ground by under-funding and other bad government decisions, in part (my inner cynic shouts loudly) to make privatisation look more attractive as an option.

> so that the service quality degrades and the private sector can swoop in as the saviour. This is controversial because:

There are a couple of other reasons:

The Lansley reforms were about increasing non-NHS provision. They mostly failed because private providers simply can't do the job for the money the NHS gets paid.

Where we see private provision (for example, specialist commissioning in mental health services, or learning disability and autism services) we see terrible standards of care. Winterborne View, Whorlton Hall, St Andrews, are all non-NHS providers. Cygnet Health have had a bunch of inadequate CQC reports.

The US is hardly some low regulation capitalist utopia. The US regulatory code is enormous. Plenty of self-proclaimed "Europeans" think it is, but in my experience they often know relatively little about the issues in question and are just parroting cultural talking points they picked up elsewhere.

Indeed, you seem to admit that here, when you state that you got your views of what British people believe from your "news bubble". For example you think everyone else thinks the NHS is awesome, because left-wing journalists told you that's what everyone thinks. One day you'll talk to a Brit outside of that bubble and get a real shock to discover they aren't enamoured with the NHS at all. Remember, nobody has copied the NHS model. Nobody! The rest of the EU looked at it and thought the UK was crazy to do that, they all went with far greater private sector involvement. The NHS is a socialist anachronism and plenty of people would love to move to a more standard social insurance model, but even expressing such an opinion results in nasty, vicious attacks by the left, so people quickly learn to just stay quiet about it.

Quite possibly one day there will be a referendum on this and the same sorts of people whose minds were blown by Brexit will have their minds blown a second time by the degree to which people vote against the NHS.

Likewise for rail. The UK just had a vote on that: Corbyn had very few identifiable policies but re-nationalisation of rail was one of them. Voters rejected that agenda on an a-historic scale. Again, if it ever became a topic of serious political debate like the EU did before the Brexit referendum, you'd be shocked at how little support nationalisation would end up having. Ridership was in decline for decades before privatisation. The moment they were privatised that trend went into reverse and ridership started climbing again, until it reached new records pre-COVID. Ticket prices were rising because the newly privatised railways became so popular (limited supply+growing demand=rising prices).

Regulation: Whilst the US is not a low regulation zone by international standards, the EU is even worse. I love this headline, UK leaving GDPR. Hell yes. Another brilliant move by the UK post-Brexit, the latest in a string of them. GDPR is a disastrous "law", in quotes because it barely qualifies as a law at all in the traditional sense when you read it. Laws are meant to explicitly state what they disallow but the GDPR is so vaguely worded it could be interpreted to mean almost anything. Just on basic constitutional grounds, junking it is a smart move.

But there are practical benefits too. GDPR imposes staggering costs on businesses to deliver dubious 'benefits' which approximately nobody outside of the reflexive "it's EU so it must be good" bubble actually cares about. There has been no mass migration away from US tech firms at any point, GDPR implementation changed basically nothing about the online experience and the EU's various attempts to legislate tech firms away from domestic markets just made it impossible to create local competitors. Beyond being banned from some local US newspapers and forcing yet more privacy popups everywhere, GDPR has been largely impact-free.

>For example you think everyone else thinks the NHS is awesome, because left-wing journalists

Or because 87% of Britons polled said that they are very proud of it.

>you'd be shocked at how little support rail nationalisation would end up having.

56% in favor. 15% actively against. Majority support even by members of the party that was most against it.

>The NHS is a socialist anachronism

This is a popular view among investors & high net worth individuals. The US system is extraordinarily profitable as a mechanism for parasitic wealth extraction and UK based investors are not blind to this. They want some sugar too.

Nonetheless even UK right wing papers owned by those very people shy away from this view. 87% is above the threshold where they feel comfortable contradicting the popular view.

Rail nationalisation was below that threshold and the barclay brothers owned telegraph, for instance, would attack the idea with savage abandon of a rabid dog.

56% in favor. 15% actively against. Majority support even by members of the party that was most against it.

When Cameron first called the referendum Remain was in the lead. When topics are debated thoroughly in the public sphere and serious campaigns are run, people's opinions can shift pretty dramatically. That's why politicians campaign.

Nobody has ever spent time campaigning to keep railways privatised in the UK because the Conservatives have always chosen to fight elections on other issues, whilst Labour have made nationalisation a priority for years. If people were asked to make a direct decision on this and there was competent campaigning involved, I am very sure nationalisation would lose. The arguments are weak.

87% of Britons polled said that they are very proud of [the NHS]

The same poll showed even more people are "proud" of the fire brigade, although there's nothing special about the British fire service. They are also more "proud" of the post office than Oxford or Cambridge universities. All that poll says is that people tend to answer "proud" (whatever that's interpreted to mean) when asked about institutions which they frequently interact with and are rarely exposed to any criticism of.

Just like with the railways, British people are not exposed to serious debate about the NHS. The Conservatives have, for now at least, given up trying to debate it because they prefer to be a centrist party and because Labour consistently exploit people's emotions by conflating the NHS with healthcare. For instance the left will happily imply that any criticism of the NHS (a bureaucracy) means hatred of nurses and loving of cancer, or other nonsense.

>Just like with the railways, British people are not exposed to serious debate about the NHS.

They're exposed to investor dogma like yours on a daily basis from most of the investor owned media (telegraph, the mail, etc.). It isn't quite as vehement as yours because they know the limits of what their audience would accept but their owners views are broadly in line with yours.

It's a bit hard to attack an institution that cured your readerships' mother's cancer, for instance, and not lose their trust. They learned this lesson the hard way.

>For instance the left will happily imply that any criticism of the NHS (a bureaucracy) means hatred of nurses

They'll state that a below inflation pay rise does that because it does. They tried to supplant it with a weekly "clap a thon" instead. Cringeworthy.

Although, it's not strictly nurses investors and the investor backed government hate it's nursing unions, among other impediments to parasitic US-style profit driven value extraction.

> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

I don't even have any stakes in this argument, but:

> All that poll says is that people tend to answer "proud" (whatever that's interpreted to mean) when asked about institutions which they frequently interact with and are rarely exposed to any criticism of.

You just wrote above:

> One day you'll talk to a Brit outside of that bubble and get a real shock to discover they aren't enamoured with the NHS at all.

> plenty of people would love to move to a more standard social insurance model

Probably should choose one: either people have an bad opinion of NHS, or they don't.

My statements aren't in contradiction: there are absolutely people in the UK who are not enamoured of the NHS and it's not that hard to find them. They are probably not in a majority at the moment, but a well run political campaign could change that, because there are plenty of strong anti-NHS arguments that the population is rarely exposed to.

>The NHS is a socialist anachronism

I believe the NHS funding and operational model is similar to that used by military veterans in the US.

Let's not forget that approximately 20% of all UK COVID cases were caught in hospital. Not exactly the envy of the world.

FWIW, I think we should keep the NHS and have it free at point of use. However, I don't really care how that service is provided - government employees, private, whatever - as long as the service is good.

> Let's not forget that approximately 20% of all UK COVID cases were caught in hospital. Not exactly the envy of the world.

Do you have a source for this? How does it stack up against other countries? Is it possible a greater share of people were hospitalised and thus the number of infections at hospitals was higher as a result?

https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/the-ongoing-problem-of-hospita...

It's been getting steadily albeit very slowly worse for years. The Conservative government has been following a variant of the privatization handbook for over a decade now: https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/06/tsa-as-example-of-pr...

Overall costs have not been going down much but various parts of the service are given to contractors who do a worse job at a higher price and take a fat cut. Richard Branson notably has done this. The PPE fiasco that caused much of the spread of COVID was largely because of this - much of it was bought and didn't arrive: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/ppe-scandal-procur...

Nonetheless people's emotional impressions of the service tend to have a lag. Your Mother's cancer treatment from 9 years ago will have a much bigger effect on your impression of the institution than statistics about how well it is doing now.

Eventually it will be privatized entirely as a "fix" for the problems caused by privatization and the costs will skyrocket.

Just like the cost of my railway season ticket to London or a trip to the doctor in the US.

The key principle of the NHS is "free at the point of delivery". I don't really care who provides the service.

And let's not forget Tony Blair put in place some internal market reforms as well.

  >The NHS is a socialist anachronism

Always makes me laugh when Americans use "socialist" as a derogatory term. A huge number of people in Europe [myself included] are proud to consider themselves "socialists".

To be fair the founder of the NHS did see it as a socialist:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneurin_Bevan

"Illness is neither an indulgence for which people have to pay, nor an offence for which they should be penalised, but a misfortune the cost of which should be shared by the community."

To be clear: if the NHS is socialism (and I think it is) then I'm happy to have some socialism in my country.

Yeah must be a bad thing being a society who helps each other...like a family probably would..terrible TERRIBLE :)

It is interesting to see that european countries, who have national health systems, tend to have an higher life expectancy than the U.S. [0] Maybe the opportunity to live longer and healthier can be considered a sort of socialist anachronism. [0] https://www.worldometers.info/demographics/life-expectancy/

This comment was very unfairly down-voted in my opinion. I've noticed that hackernews often down-votes some interesting comments.

I would say that most people will not vote against the NHS though. They may vote to reform it or get it more money, but they will not mostly vote to get rid of it.

The NHS is an upside down version of the US healthcare system. In the UK the political system is hijacked by the population to keep doctors wages low. In the US the political system is hijacked by the healthcare industry in order to keep healthcare wages high.

1) I think the NHS is a red line for many people in the UK, whereas criticising the EU has been a national sport since before there was an EU. I think you are misinformed

2) left wing journalists? For what newspaper? The UK newspaper industry is dominated by right wing papers. I think international readers may get there wrong idea about it because they see the guardian online... because the guardian is free it gets shared a lot. If you want to see a typical British newspaper try the Daily Mail (Don't take this as a recommendation!)

3) The idea that the Corbyn election defeat was mostly about rail nationalisation is one of the most absurd things I have ever read.

4) The businesses I work with spent trivial sums on GDPR.

Alright, but how can you nationalize these businesses under EU laws and regulations?

I'm rather sure your Labor party (at least Corbyn) was constantly attacking EU/Brussels and often dutch for neoliberalism.

If your political position is re-nationalisation then it's easier to do it outside the EU unless you think the Conservative party stays in power forever.

You realise that salad in the UK is already chlorinated, right? I don't see that being an issue. It's just protectionism.

https://www.which.co.uk/news/2020/09/chlorine-washed-chicken...

The government is severely underfunding the NHS, despite paying it lip service

Have you ever known any government departments that don’t howl about being underfunded? The NHS is the 4th largest employer in the world, 1.3 million employees to provide healthcare to a nation of 67 million.

The Labour Party is currently claiming that NHS spending will be cut next year... because the emergency funding for the Covid situation won’t be made a permanent part of its budget!!

> The NHS is the 4th largest employer in the world, 1.3 million employees to provide healthcare to a nation of 67 million.

Yet taxpayer funding for health per head of population in the UK is lower than

France

Germany

Sweden

Switzerland

And get this -- THE USA

In 2009 - so before Obamacare came in, the US government spent $3,700 per person on healthcare. Not per person covered by medicare and military, per citizen.

The UK spent $2,700, and everyone was covered.

Spending is irrelevant, the success lies in outcomes. You brought the US up, and it’s a good example here: very high costs, poor outcomes.

Outcomes of a health system are tricky to measure compariatively, let alone put a dollar value on, which I guess is why people like them. Broadly though, UK, Germany, France, Sweden health systems tend to have the same ballpark. UK has always cost far less than those countries though.

And the coverage sucked. The care provided by the NHS is very poor while paying its employees very little and forcing to work with garbage equipment.

The care provided by the NHS is very poor while paying its employees very little and forcing to work with garbage equipment.

Doctors and administrators are very well paid. Even nurses are when you factor in the pension. The only genuinely underpaid staff in the NHS are its cleaners who are the REAL frontline against infectious diseases. Didn’t see them doing many Tiktok dances however, too busy with real work.

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