UK Rail services to come under unified state control
Hurrah! Even as a free market conservative I've long been in favour of this: bidding for the multi-year contract to operate a line is a poor proxy for (impossible) proper competition where rail users could vote with their feet and wallets.<p>There's effectively only one operator anyway, for a given journey, it should be the state, awarding the multi-year contract to the elected government is strictly better than to a private company where there's little/much more indirect incentive to do anything in the interest of the consumer.<p>You don't travel with X from A to B because you think X is great value for money and provides a really top notch service; you do it because you need to get from A to B and X happens to be the operator.<p>However.. I'm pessimistic... I'm sure operators will push back on 'under one brand', and argue they need this that and the other in order to differentiate themselves and effectively compete...