The last government allowed drift in the arguments about nationalisation. They decided a fully nationalised railway might be less bad than a largely nationalised one. They failed to explain that Labour had nationalised the main assets of our railway , all the track, signals and stations. They failed to point out the so called private sector train companies had to accept timetables, fares and capital expenditure plans laid down by government officials. They failed to remind people that in the early years of a largely privatised railway before the government took over Railtrack and made most of the decisions about trains passenger numbers surged and services improved. There had been decades of losses, passenger decline and poor punctuality at British Rail.
They failed to mention the fact that the biggest disaster, a new railway from London to the north, so delayed and over budget it would never reach the north , was fully nationalised throughout.
As they failed to get the establishment to right the wrongs and pay the compensation promptly to the Post Office staff sent to prison they never mentioned this business had always been nationalised. It had hit a new low in the way a nationalised industry harms employees and mugs taxpayers.
As Ministers rightly condemned the water industry for sewage dumping in rivers they did not point out that the industry had regional monopolies with a Regulator so keen to keep the bills down they did not allow much investment in new reservoirs, treatment works and more pipe capacity the businesses needed. They declined to introduce competition to make the companies perform better though we have competition in gas with a single pipe to each house.
The new government is worse. It seems to want nationalisation.It cannot possibly afford to buy most of the assets it might like to own, and simply taking them would end most inward investment into the UK if property rights are torn up. Its steel adventure will probably end with the unwelcome closure of two old blast furnaces they will not renovate or replace, a huge bill for taxpayers and lawsuits with the Chinese owners.
April 27, 2025
Indeed everything they do is good for lawyers and government employees though. It train users paid the full rate for train travel and we had a level playing field on taxes between (door to door) road travel and rail travel (and with robot driven taxi and cars on their way plus more working from home) what would the real demand be when train fares are circa £3 a miles? I recently caught a train fron Newbury to London 12 carriages, mid-afternoon weekday it had 8 people on it it plus staff!
Much truth about people being short changed and cheated in the compulsory purchasing processes too. They announcement of the routes can seriously devalue all the properties in advance of any forced purchase agreements. How is poor Andrew Bridgen doing after being kicked out of Sunak dire fake Conservative party for telling the truth on Vaccines. He had these issues it seems.
How too is Sunak getting on with wording his apology for telling the house the Covid vaccines were unequivocally safe.
See the South Korean study on – The association between acute transverse myelitis and COVID‐19 vaccination in Korea: Self‐controlled case series study for yet more significant evidence on tope of the vast evidence already for excess deaths especially in some young groups, heart issue, blood clots, sudden deaths, arrhythmias, Guillain-Barre syndrome – weakness, numbness or paralysis, shingles, some cancer increases…
April 27, 2025
Nationalising Scunthorpe steel works should not involve any lawsuit with the owners. They were deliberately shutting down a strategic asset to replace product from overseas. This is the same as Port Talbot with Tata building 2 new blast furnaces in India.
No other country would be so stupid as to sell major critical infrastructure to potential enemies but we have PPE graduates who kn9w nothing.
We now have government renting private housing for channel invaders and Milibrain wanting to block out the sun to cool the earth whilst carpeting the countryside with solar panels.
We really are in a parallel world.
April 27, 2025
+1
April 27, 2025
indeed they spend a fortune subsidising solar panels that give us electricity mainly when, in the UK, it is not argent needed (as summer, daytime around lunch time) then they start blocking out the sun. The UK has plenty of clouds for sun-blocking already.
April 27, 2025
At least the Popes funeral was all very “sustainable” all those people cycling and sailing in from places like New Zealand all those “sustainable” fashion gowns and mitres and less wood for the coffin. Mind you we have not as yet had all those black and white smoke emissions yet. The ones that the spectacularly daft David Lammy actually thought were racist!
April 27, 2025
Blocking sunlight could temporarily slow the climate crisis
UK scientists are to launch outdoor geoengineering experiments as part of a £50m government-funded programme
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/apr/22/uk-scientists-outdoor-geoengineering-experiments
We’re in King Canute territory
April 28, 2025
Across Europe on sunny days we have reached the point where excess solar output is resulting in curtailment and negative wholesale prices in the middle of the day. In the UK there is almost no control over solar output because it is subsidised by Feed in Tariffs, ROCs and Solar Export Guarantees and CFDs which insulate them from market forces, and only the very largest are part of the Balancing Mechanism that would allow them to compete for curtailment revenue. Only the newest CFDs eliminate the subsidy when market prices are negative, but there is as yet only a tiny capacity on that basis. The result is that most of the needed curtailment ends up transferring to wind, and we see a proliferation of new grid battery projects for the new CFDs.
April 27, 2025
indeed they spend a fortune subsidising solar panels that give us electricity mainly when, in the UK, it is not really needed (as summer, daytime and around lunch time) then they start blocking out the sun. The UK has plenty of clouds for sun-blocking already.
April 28, 2025
Because of the existential threat caused by the use of fossil fuels I assume Greta and co will be marching through Scunthorpe demanding the steel facility be shut down.
April 27, 2025
The country has given up on free enterprise. When the privatisation of the utilities was advanced by Margaret Thatcher’s government back in the 1980s it compromised the freedom of the newly privatised entities to operate by placing a ‘watchdog’ of state public sector officials over them. There Ofgems, Ofwats etc, were introduced as a sop to left wing sensitivities. They claimed to be independent bodies not controlled by government diktat, perhaps that was code for who they were/are controlled by?
The result of this private /public sector fudge was and is a recipe for inefficiency, cost increases and over regulation. As a result we have the worst of all worlds in our key utilities. A lack of freedom to act as private businesses and complete control of policies by a public sector quangocracy with no focus on profit or value for money for the customers.
If the ever tighter control of what should be private industry is not removed and entrepreneurial innovations allowed to be advanced then we are only heading in one direction as a nation.
We are starring at an endless pot hole society, a bottomless pit of spending with no satisfactory outcomes.
The oil and gas industries could be providing the government with almost limitless tax revenue along with hogh paying employment and yet more tax revenue. What we have instead is a minister actively stopping exploration and actually pouring concrete down our gas wells to present them ever being accessed. That is what happens when the state is out of control.
It certainly is not democracy in any form as most voters understand democracy.
April 27, 2025
Something needs to be done about the appalling council parking fines crisis. According to an RAC report published last week, British drivers are facing a PCN deluge, with private companies on track to issue a record 14.5 million parking penalties this year. About one every two seconds.
Councils are using the police ANPR system, which was introduced to track Provo terrorists driving bomb-laden trucks over from Belfast to blow up Canary Wharf etc, to nick folk for alleged parking infringements. Talk about mission creep!
Councils have sub-contracted parking to private companies, who have a profit motive. They have installed expensive new electronic parking meters which need your vehicle’s registration number – apparently to stop people from sharing parking tickets. It seems that many are defective and are issuing PCNs even when the ticket has been paid.
There are groups on Facebook who are encouraging people to band together and refuse to pay unwarranted PCN’s. Good on them.
April 27, 2025
So you had a parking fine. I almost feel sympathetic.
April 27, 2025
Exactly what I thought 😉
April 27, 2025
Indeed motorist mugging is a very inefficient form of taxation I expect it costs them at least 50% of what they raise. Then together with all the taxes, tolls, deliberate congestion, pot holes many give up then often they cannot get to work so give that up to and the government loses that taxation!
April 27, 2025
Morning sir John
200 years of the railways and still can’t rely on them
One sham government after another I’m 79 there has never in my lifetime been a good time for the normal woking person its all take nothing back
some people on the old state pension are struggling while having money taken off them.
the number of people scamming the system is growing that’s without the illegals
Living a life of luxury compared to those who have worked all their life time.
If services are own by government it’s doesn’t matter if they loose money the government put prices up make train travel to expensive to use then the tax payers will foot the bill to pay all the over paid management and government ministers
April 27, 2025
Starmer’s re-nationalisation of British Steel has proved to be a wildly popular move in Lincolnshire and across the country. All operations at British Steel are being maintained, including Scunthorpe Rod Mill.
Recalling Parliament during the Easter recess demonstrated resolve in supporting British interests and has impressed many folk north of Watford Gap
The two blast furnaces (“Queen Anne” and “Queen Bess”) are indeed old, but can continue for many years without replacement. British Steel was forced to close one of its two blast furnaces at Scunthorpe last year after Jingye used poor quality coal, demonstrating their incompetence in steelmaking. Much of the alleged £1.3 billion loss Jingye made last year was the subsequent restarting costs for the Queen Anne blast furnace.
Without the massive debts that Jingye lumbered BS with, the Scunthorpe plant will quickly return to profitability. Meanwhile a strategic industry has returned to British control and if Jingye wish to pursue legal action over their incompetent management of British Steel, bring it on.
Reply Not yet nationalised as still owned by the Chinese. Do you really believe the government will keep both blast furnaces working all this Parliament?
April 28, 2025
@ Sir John – reply
Labour have put a lot of political capital into saving British Steel, which would make it very difficult for them to shut the blast furnaces now. Especially before the next general election. Without Jingye’s debt repayments the company’s losses will reduce and who knows, maybe they can turn it round into profitability. Starmer’s team say they want a private sector partner. If so, they need to be very careful who they choose.
Reply I fear they will close the 2 blast furnaces before 2029
April 27, 2025
The NHS is our greatest example of a poorly performing nationalised service. Other countries in Europe have alternative models for providing healthcare that are much loved by their inhabitants and much more cost effective than ours. We seem to do nationalisation badly. Why is this?
Yesterday I needed to chase up the NHS for a vital checkup which is now overdue, but I’ve had no appointment letter. I got through to the switchboard but was told the appointments staff don’t work at the weekend.
I reflected that if I needed to contact my insurers or bank for an administrative issue at any time it would be possible (albeit with a wait, or via online chat/enquiry form).
April 27, 2025
The Governments, 2010-2025, weren’t really Conservative. They didn’t implement any Conservative policies, so why would they have made Conservative arguments regarding Private Ownership v Nationalisation? They could have pulled the plug on the HS2 farce at any time during their 14 years in power. They chose not to and they are entirely culpable for the squandering of £100 billion+ on a pointless vanity project.
Nationalisation won’t save the Scunthorpe Steel plant although it may delay the inevitable for a few years. The Globalists’ Net Zero scam is destroying it, just as it has destroyed the steel plant in Port Talbot; our aluminium and ceramics industry; the Grangemouth Refinery; is in the process of destroying gas and oil extraction in the north sea and the car assembling industry.
We are being deliberately de-industrialised.
April 27, 2025
Donna : “We are being deliberately de-industrialised.”
Correct.
April 27, 2025
+1
April 28, 2025
Excellent post Donna.
April 27, 2025
Not this again. I am not sure if my posts will be deleted either.
People are aware how badly run and expensive our railways are. Many have experience of trains in France, Germany for comparison.
People know how expensive their utility bills have become. They are aware of the big issue of sewage in water.
April 27, 2025
My German friend regularly regales me with stories about the poor performance of Germany’s railways, which are only marginally better than ours (although cheaper). Germany is heading down the same drain as the UK, and for the same reasons.
April 27, 2025
What’s your point?
April 27, 2025
Afraid this is what happens when political manouvering for publicity sake to appease the vocal minority, overrules commercial common sense and sensible financial management.
I have run my life free of any borrowings or debt (other than a mortgage) by only spending less than I earn, but all my life I have had to pay extra taxes than I should have needed to, to pay off the debt that politicians have loaded me with, simply because they failed to manage the Countries financial affairs properly.
Shame on all politicians for the last 60 years.
April 27, 2025
The track record of Generation X politicians has been appalling so why would we want them running any more nationalised industries? I am Generation X so I have seen my generation deteriorate and I know why. In short they became weak and unprincipled. Here is the evidence: With our leadership we have let Woke-Marxism sneakily pervade the lives of the British people and we kowtowed to it. We have allowed those Marxists to gaslight our children at school into being ashamed to be British and we did nothing about it. We have let supranational organistions (eg UN, WTO, WHO, EU…) dictate the direction of major government policies and we signed up to it. We have let over 150,000 illegal migrants enter our country yet we wont declare a State of Emergency and deport all of them who are not genuine refugees back to wherever they came from. We have satisfied the UN’s intent to break Britain into submission forever with gargantuan levels of legal migration. The list goes on…
We got into this state by soft and unprincipled Generation X politicians and Starmer’s government is saturated with them. Why on earth would we encourage any of more that destructive mentality in our lives such as running more nationalised companies?
We need to get rid of them all. Fortunately there are still many principled people and we need to strategise to win the next General Election and undo all the damage that has been done.
April 27, 2025
Back in January 2018 I had a comment here:
http://johnredwoodsdiary.com/2018/01/09/what-happened-to-the-railway-industry-when-fully-nationalised/#comments
that started:
“Once again the discussion starts without any acknowledgement that at present the railway system in the UK is claimed by the EU to be just part of the EU’s railway system and is therefore subject to EU laws. Just like the postal system in the UK is held to be just part of the EU’s postal system and is subject to EU laws …. it is an oddity that some people manage to combine fanatical support for EU membership with equally fanatical support for complete re-nationalisation of the railway system in the UK, which would clearly be contrary to EU law; but then it has been observed over the years that many of the most vocal supporters of EU membership are the most abysmally ignorant of that which they support …”
I wonder how much has changed even now that we have formally left the EU.
April 27, 2025
So it’s not always necessarily right that nationalisation doesn’t work – it’s how HMG put it together and manipulate it with rules and legislation.
A partially nationalised industry would still work, largely, if there was adequate competition then.
We’ve already ascertained that nationalised industries cost the taxpayer plenty, so shouldn’t labour be moving on from this and giving us solution that doesn’t rip the taxpayer off even more!
Unfortunately our PM is full of failed ideas he wants to implement. The EU as a democratic entity has failed miserably to live up to the dream. Does that stop him from wedging us ever tighter into their unforgiving bureaucracy, or getting some of our fish stocks back?
April 27, 2025
Where are the cries and howling from those who ‘love the planet’?
April 28, 2025
+9
April 27, 2025
It’s not nationalisation in itself that is the problem it is the fact that the people who get the job to run the organisations are those who wish to sabotage the country. They also get to control the regulators overseeing private companies.
April 27, 2025
It’s nationalisation itself that is the problem. It attracts all the wrong people.
April 27, 2025
I read that the Civil Service have introduced powers which could see water bosses who cover up illegal sewage spills sent to prison for two years.
Is this legislation going to apply also to public sector employees who cover up illegal activity such as we’ve seen in the Post Office Horizon scandal?
April 27, 2025
Some postmasters died. Is that not corporate manslaughter?
April 28, 2025
It should also apply to public sector employers/employees who covered up Grooming/Rape Gangs. Some of those poor girls were murdered, yet not ONE “public servant” has ever been prosecuted for Malfeasance in Public Office.
April 27, 2025
A short-term “solution” to improve the railways would be for a new incoming administration to bribe the existing train drivers sufficiently for them to install driverless trains.
The long-term solution, as we saw with the dockers in the 1960s and the printers in the 1980s, is to change the technology. Convert steel wheels on a steel track to rubber wheels on a tarmac track and run licensed individual private vehicles (coaches and lorries) running on this tarmac (road) track controlled by computer. These licensed coaches and lorries will of course be able to run on the normal roads to provide the door-to-door flexibility needed.
April 27, 2025
What you have written is a clear illustration of the fact that the previous Government were Conservatives in name only: they had no confidence or belief in the overwhelming merit of private enterprise, and were therefor incapable of promoting it.
I am afraid I have little more confidence in the new leadership which sends reams of infantile communications addressing me as if I was a child or a moron, or probably both.
April 27, 2025
if you don’t work for the State, therefore support the one World Socialism of WEF you are a no-body. There has to be World order, World control from central command.
How else would free-loading non-entities get paid?
April 27, 2025
As 2TK & Reeves keep reminding us, Tax is Good it grows State income.
April 27, 2025
IB :
Yes, tax grows the state and the number of state employees to give better control over the population. It also helps the drive to Net Zero by reducing private spending and thereby curbing consumption. Hence the desire for high, wasteful spending in order to justify high taxation.
April 27, 2025
Cheer up everybody, the good news is that the swifts are back!
https://www.bristolswifts.co.uk/bristol-swifts-2025-blog/
So I will now go out and see whether any have arrived back at one of our local colonies.
April 27, 2025
The used to be a thing called the British Empire at its height it had 488million people, they were administered by 4,000 civil servants in the UK, but it is suggested it was around 40,000 Globally
The UK today is 69million people, with a State Employees being close to 7million roughly 18% of the working population. There are just 27million not paid by the State, so less than 50% of the Country.
The Country isn’t productive because there is no longer such a thing as service. The UK just has a handful of earners in place to keep many, many people in money. The Norman Conquest all over slaves to feed the hangers on.
April 27, 2025
From today’s Telegraph
‘Sun-worshipping quangocrats’ log in from as far afield as Australia and the Maldives
Transparency figures collated by the Taxpayers’ Alliance show that so-called quangocrats have worked as far afield as Australia, Japan and the Maldives.
In some cases, quango staff have been granted permission to spend whole years working from locations such as South Carolina and Ireland.
Can the majority of Taxpayers themselves even afford to go abroad let alone have a day off?
April 27, 2025
”Labour’s new border tsar on £130k per year wants to work from Finland”
https://www.gbnews.com/politics/labour-border-tsar-work-remotely-finland
April 27, 2025
Private enterprise may not be perfect but compared to the mess government officials make if running anything it certainly preferable
April 27, 2025
@Tim Shaw – true. Nothing sharpens things up like competition and that ‘failure costs’ – it cost you. Then again if you are not pushing you are never close to the envelope
April 27, 2025
So do we know why the last government ” allowed drift in the arguments about nationalisation”?
Former BEIS Secretary Kemi might be able to tell us of course.
April 27, 2025
@formula57 – we live in a ‘One Party’ State where command and control from the centre pushes ego to the limit. Its a personal reward thing, the minions, that do the hard paying are just that the minions for personal use.
What would happen if we could find a Government that works with and for all – instead of fighting to suppress those that do.
April 27, 2025
Just because the term ‘terrorist’ doesn’t fit with the governments narrative, its still terror if the actions cause terror, than it’s a ‘terrorist’ act ….ploughing a car into a parade of people, terrifies those people, it doesn’t matter if they a member of a organised or known group, or having a medical episode ….they produce an event of terror
April 27, 2025
And in other news not reported in the UK –
‘Thousands of people took part in an anti-immigration rally in Dublin city centre on Saturday’
https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/dublin/2025/04/26/anti-immigration-protest-marking-easter-rising-gathers-crowds-in-dublin/
April 27, 2025
Thanks glen
What is happening over there is criminal. And done to them by there own people. I am glad that they are beginning to react and hopefully regain control over their government.
April 28, 2025
The Irish are being “enriched” so rapidly with criminal migrants that some rural parts of their country, as well as parts of Dublin and other cities, have turned from vast majority ethnic Irish (ie 98%) to minority ethnic Irish in about 5 years.
April 27, 2025
This is a very old argument! Personally, I think private enterprise will always do better if it is allowed to. But I see no reason why a nationalised industry, with quality management and freedom to do the job, could not be managed efficiently. Sadly, that is not our experience in the UK, and the current nonsense in running the railways is an example. The last 14 years of non-conservative government were a waste of time. No conservative values were promoted, and no conservative principles were followed. Government spending, Immigration and tax are the perfect examples of why they were decimated at the last GE. They deserved to be!
But the result of their failure is an even more incompetent Labour Government, full of MPs with no business experience at all. None of them has the experience to run a nationalised or private industry successfully.
Hopefully, Labour will. be decimated at the next GE, but how much damage will they have done by then!
April 27, 2025
By far the biggest and most expensive nationalisation will be all the manpower and industries (businesses?) involved in the unilateral Net Zero by 2050 decarbonisation of the UK. In order for electricity and electrical appliances to appear to be competitive with hydrocarbon energy, and sufficient to avoid rolling backouts, all the levies and policy costs for electrity generation and new devices plus all the massive and necessary costs to upgrade the national and local grids for distribution are currently planned to be added to either general taxation or onto hydrocarbon energy or both of course. Just the decarbonisation of electricity (20% of our energy use) by 2030 will, according to NESO’s HS2 estimate, cost “over £40bn annually” between now and 2030.
April 27, 2025
The confusion and incompetence leading to inevitable collapse is deliberate, imo; it is needed for the desired “reset”, which will take the form of a “debt amnesty”, by the end of which you will own nothing. CBDC will then be “required” to solve the problems they have created.
April 28, 2025
Yes, the engineered “crash” is coming.
April 28, 2025
Dear Sir John,
You do not mention perhaps the most important UK nationalisation of the past 15 years, that of the monopoly nuclear power generator. That is of course because it has been nationalised by the French government rather than the British.
Does that make any difference? EDF’s UK operations seem to be safe and competently run and, one way or another, probably account for considerably more than the nominal 20 per cent of total electricity. However, construction of the new Hinkley Point power station seems like a typical UK public sector infrastructure project, wildly over budget and wildly late.
Hard to tell how far this is due to the group’s EPR design, which has run into trouble elsewhere, how far to post-Fukushima changes and how far to Whitehall’s predeliction to regard final agreed designs of anything as early drafts. The British public will find out – eventually – when they see how the cost and timing of Sizewell C works out.
April 28, 2025
Worth pointing out that the entire fleet of AGRs was built in 24 years from the first order to the last coming on stream. And even that was far from being a good example of procurement, featuring at least three quite different designs for what was essentially the same power station.