Another Election

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thesweetcheat wrote:
Mark Steel spot on as usual:

"Nothing says you’re grasping the digital age and leaving the past behind as much as dressing in a red tunic and galloping over a fence with beagles so you can catch a fox and celebrate its liver being ripped out by smearing its blood on your child’s cheek. That’s the sort of futuristic vision you’d get from a brainstorming session at Apple."
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/labour-leaked-manifesto-1970s-stuck-tories-fox-hunting-jeremy-corbyn-theresa-may-a7730941.html?amp

Love it! Thanks for that tsc, must send it to my London based son who is 'not sure' about the Tories.

This bit "Then they want to bring back the railways into public ownership. At the moment, when we’re stuck outside Bristol Temple Meads for three hours due to a signal failure, at least we can comfort ourselves in the knowledge the bloke who owns this service is worth £80bn"... is not an exaggeration. This happened to me on way back from Stroud a couple of weekends ago. Signal failure at Didcot caused chaos for several hours - we actually did spend three hours sitting on a non-moving train, stuck at Kemble.

I had an exchange with someone yesterday who maintained that BR was rubbish and that privatised rail services were much better. I asked for a source, first I got "google it" then something about knowledge he has got from his love of railways (not sure how I was going to Google that, but whatever). Anyway, it prompted me to dig this out, which contains a lot of data about how efficient BR had got by the 90s, when Major sold it off:
http://turniprail.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/no-steven-norris-in-1990s-british-rail.html?m=1