His objections to HS2 is bizarre I have to say, maybe he thinks the money will be used for other rail projects - I doubt it.
He makes a good point about the ideology of politicians though. There seems to be this belief that the market is by default the best system, whereas it can be argued that in some areas (such as naturally loss making ones like railways or rural bus services, or for services that are expensive but we all need at some stage, such as health care) it's far from optimal.
The point is McNulty compares our 'private' railway to many nationalised or publically owned railways throughout the world, and guess what it's less efficient. So you would think the best course of action is to have it in public ownership - but McNulty doesn't consider this at any great length.
Whereas I think monolithic BR probably wasn't the best structure, in sector days separate business units did provide a benchmark. The greatest hazard would have been that private industry would have picked off profit making inter-city and freight and left regional railway to the dogs.
Nevertheless there is no reason the Conservative government if the 1990s couldn't have split it up regionally (similar to the old BR regions) and had councils, PTEs and other public authorities owning and running it.
The only thing that possibly should have been privatised was freight, because it can stand, by and large, on it's own two feet. Maybe this is the reason that the highly successful US freight system is very well suited to private ownership? Whereas UK TOCs know they can run cap in hand to government as soon as there is a downturn, especially as there are limited players.
