 So you may have seen the relatively minor, inconsequential news this morning of the British government effectively nationalising the entire rail network. You can imagine how that may have gone at the Department for Transport or how was your morning? What's okay? We just nationalised the entire rail infrastructure of this country. What was that? Nationalised the rail infrastructure, all the trains. Oh, why would you do that? Markets, after all, are so rational. It's the optimal way of allocating resources. Well, we don't really believe that, do we? It's all for public consumption, the shit set in the van. So we're going to get the state to administer what is a vital piece of national infrastructure. That was the case, by the way, before COVID-19 happened in the instance of rail as elsewhere. Now, why has that happened? It's because the rail operators, which are private companies, they have shareholders which run particular networks, particular lines, whether it's southeast, southern, a range of them. Two of them were already in national ownership, by the way, public ownership, east coast mainline and northern. They are about to go bankrupt, because, of course, quite rightly, passenger numbers are in free fall as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. And of course, we have free market capitalism, which means that in the good times, you get to privatise the gains, you get to privatise the profits. There are shareholders of these companies who make money from these networks, which are actually subsidised by the taxpayer, billions of pounds a year. But in the bad times, you're not going to go to the wall, you won't go bankrupt, we're going to socialise all the losses. What person wouldn't invest in that kind of business? What kind of person would not invest in a rail operator? We'll get profits, bolstered by taxpayer subsidies, and if things go badly wrong, like public health crisis, don't worry, we'll be bailed out. Does that sound reasonable to you? And it's the exact same story we saw with the global financial crisis in the banks, after 2008. You privatise the gains, you socialise the losses. The agreement that's been put out there seems that it's got buy-in from pretty much everybody who needs to buy into it, is that there's going to be a small payment given by the Department of Transport to the rail operator, 2%, so they have the incentives to carry on business as usual. And all the losses, all the revenues, of course there aren't going to be revenues, there's no profit made when, you know, passenger numbers are tanking, will be paid for by the taxpayer. How is this free market capitalism? And then of course somebody would say, well look, it's a vital piece of national infrastructure. Yeah, that's right, which is why it should be in public ownership, which is why it shouldn't be subject to the maximisation of shareholder value. This is, I think, a supreme example of how the economy as it's run for decades isn't a free market system. By the way, there isn't really such a thing as a free market system, because the second it comes up against the limits of reality, like a financial crisis, bailout. Health pandemic, bailout. Climate change, bailout. It shows the limits of this way of doing things. Trains, both now and before and in the future, a critical piece of public infrastructure, they should be publicly owned. It is an absolute outrage that once again, these market fundamentalists who think the market's always right, the state is always wrong, have decided to privatise those profits and to socialise the losses. If they really believe in the merits of capitalism and free markets, why don't they put their money where their mouth is and let these companies go to the wall and just outright nationalise every single operator? Why? Because the game's rigged.