Rail nationalisation

John Redwood suggests that the Attlee government's nationalisation of the railway system in Britain was a bad idea. He is too young to have been able to have experienced rail travel before 1948, as I did. I hasten to add that I was very young at the time, but the long delays and the state of carriages left a lasting impression. The money invested in the system by successive governments afterwards made up for decades of starvation of funds by the private owners. If it had not been for that investment, British railways would have sunk to the level of US rail.

With more courage and belief in public enterprise, government could have gone further and achieved a system to rival those on the continent, which, when you take all costs into account, are not a larger drain on public funds than the UK pseudo-market set up by John Major.