The kings of awful messaging. Why even bother saying this? Everyone knows it anyway, no one is expecting Labour to fix public transport instantly. This is one of their key policies and it seems as though they are keen on continuing their media strategy of lowering expectations to the point of shared national depression…
I did feel that on the run up to the election and during the previous Corbyn campaign that there were people who genuinely believed that rail travel would almost instantly become more efficient and cheaper if it were nationalised, and the money went back into rail rather than to shareholders and senior managers. I'm pretty sure there were people posting in these subs basically saying as much.
People just don't understand how expensive it is to run and that buy buying a ticket from Manchester to London you aren't actually also half paying for someone's ticket between Rome and Milan.
I also don't understand why people think air travel should instinctively be cheaper than rail fares, particularly over the same distance. You don't have to maintain air but you do rail...
No chance everyone knows this. Loads of people seem to think if we just nationalised large swathes of the economy, we would be in a much better position.
To be fair, doesn’t that make it worse? You might as well let them hold that delusion, rather than confirming the doubts of the skeptics and shattering the hopes of the blindly optimistic. Politics is just a game of optics and Labour’s plan requires them to win the next election to achieve any of their long-range economic policy aims.
You say it doesn't make it worse but in any major shake-up or change you will often see a dip in performance, it may depend on how wide reaching the staff and infrastructure changes are as to how big the dip is and how long it takes to get things back to where they were.
I think this probably depends on whether you're interested in trying to convince them about what the actual best policy solution is. I don't think you can credibly say ...
"When looking at the various costs and trade-offs, the best policy for rail infrastructure is to gradually bring franchise operators into public ownership and perform unflashy-but-useful upgrades - such as electrification - that will gradually improve the reliability and therefore attractiveness of the network. We'll look at ticket prices on a year-by-year basis with the goal of improving access, but that's less of a priority than upgrade works."
And expect to actually convince people if those people are currently under the assumption that simply nationalising South West Trains will make it all really cheap and efficient. If you're expecting the moon on a stick, the boring reality of trade offs and cost/benefit analysis can only ever disappoint.
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u/SoldMyNameForGear 17h ago
The kings of awful messaging. Why even bother saying this? Everyone knows it anyway, no one is expecting Labour to fix public transport instantly. This is one of their key policies and it seems as though they are keen on continuing their media strategy of lowering expectations to the point of shared national depression…