The Herald gaslights Scots about their public rail company
ScotRail provides a first class service compared to privatised English rail companies
Today’s Herald headline screamed: “Alarming: Scots railways owner pays out £220m in service disruption compensation,” blaming publicly owned ScotRail. But most of the blame lies with UK government Network Rail which owns, operates and maintains Scotland’s rail infrastructure - the signals, tracks, bridges, tunnels and viaducts. This is the gentleman responsible:
According to the Office of Rail and Road’s Train Operating Company key statistics from April 2022 to March 2023, Network Rail was responsible for 63% of time delays in 2021-20222 due to infrastructure faults and for 64% in 2022-2023.
Since ScotRail was nationalised in April 2022 until March 2024, it has paid £1.5 million in compensation. How much did the 15 privatised railway companies in England and Wales pay?
With roughly 11 times Scotland’s population, the figure should be around £16.5 million. It’s £239.930 million.
Whereas ScotRail owns its rolling stock, in England and Wales it’s owned by private rolling stock companies (ROSCOs). The three main ROSCOs - Angel Trains, Eversholt, and Porterbrook - control 87% of the trains and in the last 10 years, have paid out £2.7bn in dividends to their owners, around 100% of their pre-tax profits.
In 2020 alone, shareholders received £950m in dividends, money that should have been reinvested but went instead to parent companies based in the low tax jurisdictions of Luxembourg, Canada and Australia.
When it comes to running a national railway, public ownership provides a cheaper and more effective service. That’s why ScotRail was renationalised. We’ll have to wait until we’re out of the failing UK to take back control of our rail infrastructure.
If the Herald were a serious paper, it would have pointed out the foregoing to its diminishing pool of readers rather than obfuscate, conceal and lie to the Scottish People about what’s really going on. Another good reason to make a quick exit from this toxic union.
Fantastic reamsearch as always and pithily made points
They are paid to write from the BritNat playbook. They would lose their jobs if they deviated. They could not write with your background knowledge, penetrating analysis and surgical dissection even if they wanted to and tried. Basically they are lackeys and placemen or as you better describe them 'stenographers'. And that's the main reason the Herald is on life support.