December 2, 2024

Passenger rail is going to be re-nationalized in the UK under the Labour government.

This is less of a left-wing measure and more of a "save passenger rail from collapsing under the failure that has been privatization" kind of measure.

Many metrics will be used by the private sector to show how this will fail:

• on time
• costs
• cancellations
• pay
• size of the bureaucracy
• rate of adoption of new technology

However, the most important metric will be price of the ticket and the subsidy rate.

Just because a service is run by the state doesn't mean it is run as a we would imagine a public utility should be run. As we have seen from many public-private partnership deals and Crown assets in Canada, the private-sector mentality seeps into every aspect of public services.

The short-term upside will be something that the left can point at to explain that it is possible to re-nationalize a productive system.

In Canada, being decades behind and never learning from others' mistakes, the Liberal government continues with its privatization of VIA Rail passenger service in the corridor.

We also will not learn that the privatization of postal services around the world has been a disaster. The CUPW strike is likely to be the end of the road for public postal services. Canada Post and VIA Rail are among the last major productive services on the chopping block for the 1990s liberal ideologues in the Canadian government and OECD.

Under a future Conservative government, CBC will likely be shuttered instead of privatized.

In the face of a new era in geopolitics driven by cold (and hot) wars between the USA and their geopolitical rivals, it is clear to me that we need to rediscover public ownership.