General British politics discussion thread

Historically, British voters have tended to vote Conservative as they get older … but that's no longer the case. To paraphrase the small print from investment offers "the value of your historical trend may go down as well as up".

As I've said before, I think there's a precedent worth taking account of in recent French political change. Up until three elections ago, it was the same stagnant Left-Right game of musical chairs since the founding of the 5th République, with a token protest vote for the Far Left and the Far Right. Then JM LePen and the Front National succeeded in getting their spanner into the works, and suddenly everything changed, with both the moderate Left and moderate Right being almost obliterated and Macron's right-of-centre party springing up from nowhere to win two consecutive terms.

From the comfort of my continental armchair, it looks like there's such a level of disgust with the Tories these days that there's a realistic possibility they'll be relegated to third place and a non-negligible chance they might end up worse than that. I would expect Labour to be in a strong position to win a comfortable majority in the next election, but with a lot of other parties now fighting for the public's attention, we might (finally) be looking at the beginning of the end of FPTP in Britain.

It was the majority of the UK electorate that preferred to keep the Tories in charge over Corbyn. Twice.

The movement from the centrists within Labour to try and remove him was to do with having a leader who might actually win an election and unseat the Conservatives.

The EU directive at the time was for separate accounting units for infrastructure and train operators…. not the wholesale sell off as implemented in Britain in the 1990s. UK govt sold off the infrastructure as Railtrack and the inevitable happened

When I get on a train in Spain it's Renfe, France SNCF, Ireland Irish Rail. Get on a local bus in Cork it's Bus Eireann/TFI

There might be some train spotter anorak stuff going on behind the scenes but it is not the same as the completely separate entities at the consumer end that the UK have.

you must be mistaken about the bus numbering, because the local transport authority are responsible for that and what routes buses run and where they stop.

Fares are set centrally, so when you tap your leap card, it is TFI that you are paying and they pay the transport companies accordingly.

YouGov has the Conservatives on 8% with the under 50s. One wonders if the party can ever recover with these types of numbers against them.

for now. Spain has several other train companies now and France, well let’s just say ignoring EU rules isn’t exactly uncommon for them is it. SNCF is now a listed company though and this is seen as the French governments attempts to fall in line with the rest of Europe and open up their rail network to competition.

I don't agree on the fundamental principle of running national infrastructure as a private franchise. It rarely if ever saves a penny and generally costs far more as private sector concern. It's an ideological position that private always equals better - but there is very little evidence it does.

The only issue I have with nationalised infrastructure is there has to be several penalties for individuals who mismanage or corrupt the service and there has to be oversight with teeth.

If you are talking to me all I can say is customers don't care who the "transport companies" are.

In London you get on a red bus and tap your Oyster. People don't care what company runs the route.

In many other areas of the UK they do not have a TFL and 1 cities bus service will have many different liveries, timetables and route maps.

A bit like FF - if you're below a certain age there's almost no chance you'll ever vote for them.

you mean like in Dublin, where you can have Go ahead or Dublin Bus running citywide routes, air coach running services to the airport or the likes of Finnegans and Kavanagh running routes in and out of the city?

Scot rail and TFW have been taken over by what is called the operator of last resort. In other words either their service was so bad the state was forced to step in, or they went bust.

Yes I am wrong ?

Because every train I have seen in Europe follows the TFL model and not the British train model of separate livery, timetables and booking sites.

Nobody is claiming private doesn't exist but the vast majority of the inner city public transport bus service in Dublin is Dublin Bus.

Same as it's TFI in the other cities.

Ive never seen or heard of anyone mention anything other than SNCF.

Its quite clear at this stage anyway that you have no interest in being honest on the subject.

When you get on a train in France these days, it could be SNCF (or one of its many subdivisions), Trenitalia, Renfe, Thalys, Eurostar, DB-ICE … A completely new company had been hoping to run services from Lyon to Bordeaux, but they've recently given up citing the insurmountable cost of entering the market. Needless to say the much-vaunted "competition" from having multiple operators on the same tracks has not translated into an improved service for anyone not living in the major population centres, so our local/regional governments bend every EU rule to just short of breaking point and subsidise various private companies to provide the bones of a reliable rail (and bus) service for us rural dwellers.

The same situation can be seen in many other "hot topic" campaign matters - the homelessness, young people "forced" to live with their parents, health care in crisis, drug-fuelled gang wars, etc, etc, etc. On any given day, I'll see the same stuff feature here on boards and be attributed to the failing FFG gubbermint as I'll read about on Le Figaro (attributed to Macron) or hear on Sky (being the fault of the Tories), and my occasional forays into German, Spanish and Italian current affairs reveal much the same.

Call me an auld cynic, but I've come to the conclusion that most voters - whatever their nationality, wherever they live - are too damn stupid to realise that if they keep voting against progressive change, they'll get the same useless governance they've always had … until enough of them vote for some version of the Far Right and feck up the country completely.