Labour should explain more

They promised to ‘freeze energy bills’ - their knee-jerk reaction when bills dropped was to claim they really meant ‘cap’! They promised every student the chance to go to University, so many colleges dutifully transmogrified... into ‘Universities’! Labour now promises that “by 2025 as many students will start apprenticeships as go to university”. An impossible promise to administer for it will, by definition, deprive up to half of all students a university education. But then Labour deplores ‘elite’ education, such as Grammar schools which genuinely gave children from poor, hard-working families the university education which benefited many Labour MPs, PMs and propagandists! But that’s socialism!

Labour still fails to understand basic economics, commerce, EU rules and that if they increase, as they insist, the population in the South East, they will cause the very congestion, delays and higher costs about which they and commuters complain! Railway tracks and stations have a finite capacity for the safe number of trains and passengers carried, and discharged; these are managed by Network Rail, not the 25 train operators! To whom the trains are franchised makes little difference, for they, the logistics and operating requirements are regulated by the Office of Railway Regulation (established by Labour in 2004), which enforces EU anti-competition rules. But now Labour intends abandoning the very railway franchise system, established under their Strategic Rail Authority of 2001 (abolished in 2005 and transferred to the Department of Transport), which the Tories inherited!

Labour won’t leave the EU, so how would their proposed nationalisation work and why didn’t they nationalise the railways when in office? Please explain.

Barry M Jones

Bixley Lane, Beckley