The rail franchises in the UK are forced to work within a strict set of conditions and targets. And almost every franchise that has ever operated has failed to meet their targets, yet they are profitable because they also get public subsidies.
The subsidies are then cut when they don’t meet the targets. And so the franchises continually fail, but make lots of money in the meantime. It’s a ridiculous system which the private sector is gaming for profit.
I understand the freight trains have priority over the passenger trains across much of the US. So it seems to be in a unique situation. I’m not sure how many passenger-only lines there are in the US, but it would be interesting to see how successful those are.
In theory, Amtrak trains have priority during the window when they’re scheduled to be on a particular segment of track. But if a train is delayed and falls out of that window, it loses its priority.
Note the “In theory.” While contracts between Amtrak and the host railroads specify the above, there doesn’t seem to be any enforcement mechanism. And some railroads *cough* Union Pacific *cough* are notorious for ignoring Amtrak’s supposed priority.
Meanwhile, new Home Secretary Yvette Cooper reveals that the unutterably stupid and cruel Conservative plan to relocate asylum seekers to Rwanda has already cost taxpayers £700 million, and relocated a mere FOUR VOLUNTEERS.
And that the government planned to spend £10 billion over the next six years, much of which would be fixed costs and thus would be spent regardless of how many or how few people were actually relocated.
The Tories really are the gift that keeps on giving.
£175 million per asylum seeker. It’d be much cheaper to give them one percent of that to find a country willing to let them settle. I expect there would be plenty willing to let someone with £1.75 million settle.
The King’s Speech 2024 The King's Speech 2024 - GOV.UK is ambitious in that it contains such a large number of bills. However, I’d expect limited debate on many of them. There just won’t be time. Moreover, I wouldn’t call it “meaty”. The King’s Speech is meant to be a mission statement with the details coming later. Even so, there’s an awful lot of vagueness towards what the Starmer government will actually try to accomplish with each bill.
Here’s the first paragraph that mentions bills:
Stability will be the cornerstone of my Government’s economic policy and every decision will be consistent with its fiscal rules. It will legislate to ensure that all significant tax and spending changes are subject to an independent assessment by the Office for Budget Responsibility [Budget Responsibility Bill]. Bills will be brought forward to strengthen audit and corporate governance, alongside pension investment [Draft Audit Reform and Corporate Governance Bill, Pension Schemes Bill].
I think it’s a great idea to have the OBR assess government tax and spending plans. But 1) it’s not apparent what will change from the OBR’s current mission. For example, will the OBR assess if charging VAT on private school fees will provide funding for 6500 new teachers, one of the very few expressed targets in the King’s Speech? Also, 2) there’s no commitment what the Starmer’s government is going to do if they disagree with the OBR’s assessment. If the OBR’s assessment of the bill to nationalise the railways is that it will cost far more than the government has budgeted, will that bill have to be redrafted? I’m sceptical any government, much less a Labour government, will allow its spending plans to be constrained by an outside agency.
For the other two bills in that paragraph, the King’s Speech basically says nothing. Is the UK government going to be more transparent about its annual budgets and if those budgets match to actual spending? That would be great. Or are they just going to create a committee to try to improve fraud prevention? Same with the Pension Schemes Bill. What does “alongside pension investment” mean?
I can’t say that I agree with every proposal in the King’s Speech, but I think it has a lot of potential. But unfortunately, about a year from now when it’s time for the next King’s Speech, if we look back on what’s been accomplished, it will mostly be things that didn’t cost very much and didn’t have much change on the status quo.
Personally, I’d like to see a system where the government is allowed to own companies of any sort, and compete against the private sector. If the private sector fails to keep up, that’s a sign that it’s something that should have been run by the government. If the government fails to keep up, that’s a sign that it’s something that should have been private.
EDIT: Oh, and if a private company is ever “too big to fail” and needs a bailout, the bailout is in the form of a buyout, and that’s a socialized company now. Being “too big to fail” is also a sign that something should have been public-sector.
That’s close to my thinking too, the state companies will be accused (sometimes fairly) of having unfair advantages (like paying less taxes or knowing in advance about new regulations) but if they work better than the private companies I don’t think I would care.
There’s plenty of rail capacity to handle much larger volumes of freight. However, that would require investment in cargo handling facilities. That could come from private investment, but no investor is going to provide investment funds unless there’s a profitable model for delivering freight to customers. Customers are going to require delivery reliability. That’s especially true because there would need to be integrated rail/road depots. HGV’s sitting around waiting for trains cost money. Cancelled deliveries cost even more. But rail in Britain is often unreliable. A big part of the reason is due to environmental factors - “leaves on the tracks”. But train strikes are also a huge reliability issue. Under the current system, it’s extremely unlikely that rail freight will increase. I wouldn’t expect it to be any better under Labour’s proposed nationalised rail system. Which is regretful, because a better rail freight system is one of the accomplishments that needs to be achieved for the UK to reduce it’s CO2 output.
Cooper is just trying to justify her future budget. She’s going to need to spend a lot of money if she’s going to start processing asylum applications faster. I doubt Labour will do anything to intervene with small boats already crossing the English Channel, but if they try, that will cost money. Creating an agency to deal with migrant trafficking gangs and paying for European support, beyond what’s already being spent for that purpose, will cost more money. It will make little difference, but she’ll be able to say she’s spending less than the Rwanda flights would cost.
Want a prediction? The number of migrants crossing the English Channel in small boats is going to increase over the next five years. And Cooper will blame it on the Tories.
The Tories could have reduced the number of boats easily by, say, setting up asylum processing centres in France. But they didn’t want to, because getting the gammon riled up about illegal immigrants kept everyone distracted from the Tories’ wholesale looting of the public purse. They learned a lot from the Republicans, frankly.
Whether Labour will actually do it remains to be seen. But they’re less incentivised to deliberately make the problem worse.
From here, the change is that now rather than the OBR providing assessments when requested, it will be required to produce an assessment for all “substantial” fiscal announcements - room for maneouvre there, but I’m assuming that would have to cover Budgets and Financial Statements.
I’m honestly in two minds about this. Obviously, life would have been a lot better for all of us (and in fact for Truss and Kwarteng) had the OBR been allowed to assess their disastrous budget before it was exposed to the markets. But this feels like an accountability sink. Taxing and spending are political decisions which should be made by people who are democratically accountable for them. Governments being able to hide behind an OBR when they want to get out of a spending commitment, for example, is not actually a good thing. “Oh, poor little me, I can’t enact the policies I promised and on which I won a democratic mandate because the committee says no”
Fair - I meant meaty in the sense that there’s a substantial programme for government there, not that the speech was packed with policy detail. (Although, given there’s 40 bills to explicate, pity the King if it had been, he’d have been reading for hours!)
A week is a long time in politics but a year is a short time in government, as I learned from Yes Minister.
A lot of the bills proposed have potential big effects (GB Energy, planning reform, rental reform) - these can be passed quickly, but actual chagne will take a while.
Politically, Labour has inherited a big mess and can’t turn it around that quickly. But it wil want to be going into the 2028/9 election showing that they have done a lot of work which is beginning to pay off.
OBR wouldn’t be saying “You can’t do that”, but “You’ll need to find more money for it”, which moves the political debate further on rather than closing it down.
And the ones who are rejected just get on a boat anyway. But under Labour the acceptances will go way up.
The “boats” are not the problem. It’s the people on the boats, so making it easier for the people is not a solution. I’d happily have 100x as many “boats” if they were all empty.
Are the people on the boats really the problem, though? They’re not the ones spending up to $10 billion of taxpayer money on nothing (much of which would likely end up in Tory donor pockets).
Making it easier is a solution if you’re dealing with them before they get on a boat, as is actually having an asylum review system that works rather than one made deliberately dysfunctional out of spite, as we’ve had for years. And Labour will probably approve more, based on the fact that the Tories always opted for the most cruel option when it comes to asylum seekers (or indeed any poor people).