(17 Aug 2016, 8:30 am)eezypeazy wrote Oh dear... doesn't that mean that the many billions of pounds invested by shareholders in trains and buses will also cease?

So shareholders will invest their money elsewhere - possibly overseas - making it a double-whammy - overseas countries suddenly get investors interested in helping their businesses grow by investing in them, while the UK transport industry needs public investment by the Labour government, that doesn't have any money, so they go out and borrow it at what are presently historically low interest rates, which are not attractive to today's investors... so the government has difficulty raising cash that way, so resorts to good old-fashioned taxes to do it... which makes us all poorer!

Don'tcha just love left-wing politics?

As opposed to the selling off of publicly owned companies and getting a nice little few quid - but then not seeing any more income from that now privatised business, but giving them money in various guises? Like we have seen with buses, trains, banks, elements of the health sector...

Or relying on the private sector to employ people and grow in an economy hit by recession?

Or seeing these huge private companies (and their directors) not pay tax or use loopholes to reduce their contribution? Dickie Branson being a lovely example.

Or lowering tax levels for higher-earners, reducing the amount of money coming in to the treasury.

Or Public services being cut (which sometimes impacts on the bus operators), as a result of neo-liberal austerity measures imposed on the tax paying public.

Quite astounding as to how much the public purse loses out!


Don'tcha just love capitalism?
Remember those bus and coach builders who lost out after de-reg, who then closed and made thousands redundant? When all of the new privately owned operators decided not to invest in new vehicles? Pretty sure the pattern was repeated in the rail industry too...