The problem is that successive governments have preferred to boast about tax cuts rather than reducing debt. So, when government does have really good reasons to borrow more (COVID19), we end up with even more debt.
Then with the economy not doing well (a combination of things), the government decides that reducing spending on important infrastructure and important services is the answer!
It was blindly obvious to me, that the increase in the cost of energy due to the Russian war in Ukraine would lead to a rise in inflation. And that we desperately needed reform of the UK energy markets.
But the government didn’t do this. Hence if/until the price of energy plummets, prices will continue rising, and hence inflation will not fall away.
Not that I think the current government would have funded the railways (and other services such as the NHS, schools etc.) properly even if Russia had behaved itself.
The Great Western (Western and Wales) really needed the OLE to have continued going up. And as more lines were electrified, electric trains could displace the existing DMUs to the the remaining un-electrified lines.
Instead, it’s back to make do and mend. You know, something that was supposed to have gone in the bin with privatisation.
And, what’s worse, even the “new” stock (80X) is make do and mend, what with the various problems that are being found with them.
It’s almost enough to start chanting that phase that Marvin The Paranoid Android likes to say…
