The Truth Behind Traingate

I read Branson employs 50,000

No, we were not laughing at Branson.?

Of course, he is a business man seeing and seizing an opportunity to run something, trains, planes etc. At a profit.
That is what business is.
However, consumers/customers can vote with their feet, so no good running things badly.He will be expanding and extending trains along with platforms, but they cannot be built in a few minutes.

We weren't really laughing at Branson.

You think it's good that Branson fleeces the taxpayer, do you?

"But it boils down to one key finding: the only way Branson and the vast majority of train barons make their profits is through handouts from the taxpayer. And while you may know about the direct payments taken by Virgin and others, the Cresc team has also analysed another, indirect transfer from the public purse to private hands. By now, it's worth £30bn – yet it is barely acknowledged either by Network Rail or Westminster.

Let's deal with the open-air subsidies first. If you tot up all the direct subsidies Branson's west coast mainline service received between 1997 and 2012, and convert them to today's prices, you get a sum of £2.79bn handed over by us – before a single ticket has been sold. And it is certainly before you factor in the service's upgrade (worth around £9bn, and paid for by the public), and the fleet of Pendolino trains (again, largely subsidised by the government).

By 2012, Virgin Trains enjoyed spanking new rolling stock, a more frequent service and a superfast line that whisked passengers from London to Manchester in just two hours. With all that going for it, plus a booming economy up till 2007 and rising fuel prices, the company couldn't help but pull in the customers.

Most of the improvements were subbed by taxpayers, with Virgin paying the state an agreed amount in the last two years of the franchise. Yet Branson and his shareholders could declare a cumulative net profit of £538m and trouser £499m in total dividends. No wonder some canny infants like to play with train sets.

These sums are what got Virgin interested in rail in the first place. In his biography of Branson, Tom Bower records a phrase used by the billionaire's lieutenants while weighing up the west coast deal: "It's a licence to print money. Can't go wrong."

But there is another undisclosed source of cash enjoyed by Virgin and the rest of the industry. Network Rail has been cutting the track access charges levied on the train companies. Under its predecessor Railtrack, the fees were worth around £3bn a year; they're now nearly half that, at just over £1.5bn a year. This is an indirect subsidy given by the public to the train operators, and Virgin is the third-biggest recipient. So important is the handout that, were it taken away, Cresc estimates the company would have made a loss of up to £257m last year alone.

Just so there's no doubt on the numbers, the Cresc report was shown to the Association of Train Operating Companies weeks before it was published. The trade body had time to dismantle the maths; but while it evidently doesn't like the conclusions, it hasn't repudiated the figures. Years of indirect subsidies have left Network Rail £30bn in the red. This is debt guaranteed by the public, although very few people know about it.

What all this resembles is a looking-glass version of capitalism. The public are handing money to private businesses for them to take a clip and pay us back the rest. Just in case that wasn't ludicrous enough, remember that Virgin's parent company is listed in British Virgin Islands, a sunny tax haven that is a stop pretty far from Wigan. And as we've seen repeatedly with the east coast line, the ones who don't make a profit can simply walk away, dumping their service back in public hands. Heads they win, tails you lose.

Branson is not the sole offender here; he's simply the most flamboyant representative of a completely rotten system for siphoning money from the public into private hands. The entire industry, as Treasury adviser Shriti Vadera put it in 2001, is peopled by "thinly capitalised … profiteers of the worst kind". And as a former investment banker, she'd know what those looked like.

But the Virgin boss also loves to shout about the virtues of private ownership of public good. At the moment, he's lobbying hard to take control of the east coast mainline. If successful, he'll doubtless try to replicate his previous sweet deal, state-subsidised Pendolinos and all. And just like now, it will be us paying for it."

This was written in 2013 by Aditya Chakrabortti, before Branson fleeced the taxpayer even more on the East Coast Mainline.
I just do not understand why people think it good to laugh at being taken for idiots by businessmen like Branson.

Well, there you are then!?Perhaps he saw, foresaw, this thread, and closed them early.Perhaps that is why he is such a good business man, he has second sight.

Virgin only manage Durham station? Not own it? Oh! ?

Strange you should say that, lemongrove.
The women's loos were closed when we got there two weeks ago today.
My granddaughter had to wait until we were on the train before she could go to the loo.
That was Virgin's fault because they run the station platforms and the carparks.
Thanks for reminding me.

Richard is super happy because he has just realised that he owns Durham Station, he was saying to Mother 'I am closing all loos there, that will teach them to badmouth me on GN'
?

Primrose you are sooo naughty love it

Anyone who has been a Labour Party member for years has met a communist , assuming they are party activists as well as just turning up to vote

To my knowledge I've never met a communist.

I am surprised djen because you said you don't know anyone who voted Brexit, don't know anyone who did not vote for Corbyn and now have never met a communist.

Should you get out more?

lemongrove Branson's mum reading Gransnet
"But they had to stand, Richard. I read it on Gransnet"

"This serial shambles is more cock-up than conspiracy but it is of course a very British cock-up embedded in a form of post 1979 politics where the political classes defer to corporate interests. A multiplicity of different cock-ups then has predictably similar economic results in that the outcome usually advantages the corporate sector at the expense of the taxpayer"

That's political jargon. Not independent academic research. Just google 'inherent bias' and take a look at the authors of the article.

Nationalising railways did not work well last time, and they were privatised to improve.

Well, that was Thatcher's story, which you clearly swallowed, hook, line and sinker. There are those who would argue that the railways were run down by underinvestment.

I can't say that I have noticed any particular improvement in the service since they were privatised; it just became more complex to organise journeys which involved more than one train company.

Try the Executive Summary (p16ff) of 'The Great Train Robbery', an independent report on rail privatisation, published 2013

Public ownership under British Rail after 1948 is widely stereotyped as an awful failure. The academic histories show that BR was politically discredited by operating losses and economically undermined by low investment; but cash constraints and corporate reorganisation at BR did finally produce an organisation that could achieve better than European mainland level of efficiency, which was lost after privatisation (pp. 126-30)

www.tuc.org.uk/sites/default/files/tucfiles/The_Great_Train_Robbery_7June2013.pdf

If he reads Gransnet, or his Mother does, than he may well own it by the end of the week,and that would really get a few posters going.

I wonder if Branson knows that he owns it?

durhamjen you stated that Durham station was owned by Virgin.?Had you forgotten?

He is very likely Marxist, as is John McDonnell.Each to their own, but do we want Marxists running the UK?

Not strange to check on who owns Durham station, as we'd been misinformed by you.

Strange thing to do. Have you checked up on whether Corbyn is a communist or not?

I used Google to check on who owned Durham station.

Do put the claws away whitewave, I said people who know everything in reply to a poster who spoke of people who know everything.

So this us all just another diversion , carry on children

No one knows everything about something. There may be some who know quite a lot about a subject and to class them as boring speaks volumes.