On Tue, 24 Jun 2008 09:25:34 +0100, ®i©ardo  wrote:

>John B wrote:
>> On 23 Jun, 22:47, judith  wrote:
>>> It was excellent value  (to some people):
>>>
>> [snip Independent piece about the woeful ROSCO sale process]
>>> I look forward to Gaz's  (or any other Tory bastard's) justification
>>> for this profiteering.
>> 
>> There's none. Either the politicians who sold the ROSCOs were too
>> inept to understand or explain the value of the income stream they
>> were selling, or they were too crooked to care as long as they got a
>> quick sale.
>> 
>> (to be fair on the Tories, which isn't something I enjoy, the only
>> people who ended up bidding for the ROSCOs were ex-BR managers who
>> understood exactly how they worked - not banks or cronies. This points
>> towards ineptitude rather than corruption on the politicians' part.)
>> 
>> However, the fact that in 1995, the Tories gave up a one-off windfall
>> of more than a billion quid by selling the ROSCOs at well below their
>> true value, has no real bearing on whether or not the railway provides
>> value for money in 2008. If I'd sold you my five-year-old Ford Escort
>> for a fiver in 1995, that would have been a crap deal for me - but it
>> wouldn't make any difference one way or the other to the cost of the
>> new Mondeo I'm renting from you today...
>> 
>> --
>> John Band
>> john at johnband dot org
>> www.johnband.org
>
>Presumably the Tories were advised by "experts" from the railway industry.


Yes - there were at least three people:
John Prideaux, Sandy Anderson, and an Andrew Jukes - I don't know what
happened to them.

On Tue, 24 Jun 2008 03:23:23 -0700 (PDT) someone who may be John B
 wrote this:-

>No, as David Hansen says upthread, Prideaux, Anderson and Jukes were
>*not* advising the Tories on the ROSCO sale. Rather, having been
>excluded from the process, they realised the Tories and their banker
>friends were likely to undervalue the ROSCOs and put together
>consortia to bid for them, which were ultimately successful.

And in doing so they demonstrated the sort of enterprise which the
Tories and their "expert" advisors claimed anyone who worked for BR
was incapable of demonstrating, as it had been beaten out of them by
nasty public ownership.

I remember the time. A whole variety of cruel words were used by the
representatives of the brave new world to describe those who worked
for the nasty public owned organisations. Fossils is one of the more
polite words they used.

The brave new world was to be full of thrusting (a word they used a
lot) people who would show the fossils how to do things. The
arrogant words of the privateers soon turned to dust though, long
before the nadir of the panic response to Hatfield. Along with the
poll tax people should never let the Tories forget rail
privatisation and neither should people let the Labour bunch forget
that they did nothing about it (other than let John Prescott bumble
around for a while) when they should have.

Some things are getting better now, though the system we now have is
very different to the mess the Tories created. Shafting large
numbers of small Railtrack investors, often railway staff, was a
particularly foolish way of making the improvement which Network
Rail is.



-- 
  David Hansen, Edinburgh 
 I will *always* explain revoked encryption keys, unless RIP prevents me
 http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts2000/00023--e.htm#54

David Hansen wrote:
> On Tue, 24 Jun 2008 03:23:23 -0700 (PDT) someone who may be John B
>  wrote this:-
> 
>> No, as David Hansen says upthread, Prideaux, Anderson and Jukes were
>> *not* advising the Tories on the ROSCO sale. Rather, having been
>> excluded from the process, they realised the Tories and their banker
>> friends were likely to undervalue the ROSCOs and put together
>> consortia to bid for them, which were ultimately successful.
> 
> And in doing so they demonstrated the sort of enterprise which the
> Tories and their "expert" advisors claimed anyone who worked for BR
> was incapable of demonstrating, as it had been beaten out of them by
> nasty public ownership.
> 
> I remember the time. A whole variety of cruel words were used by the
> representatives of the brave new world to describe those who worked
> for the nasty public owned organisations. Fossils is one of the more
> polite words they used.
> 
> The brave new world was to be full of thrusting (a word they used a
> lot) people who would show the fossils how to do things. The
> arrogant words of the privateers soon turned to dust though, long
> before the nadir of the panic response to Hatfield. Along with the
> poll tax people should never let the Tories forget rail
> privatisation and neither should people let the Labour bunch forget
> that they did nothing about it (other than let John Prescott bumble
> around for a while) when they should have.
> 
> Some things are getting better now, though the system we now have is
> very different to the mess the Tories created. Shafting large
> numbers of small Railtrack investors, often railway staff, was a
> particularly foolish way of making the improvement which Network
> Rail is.
> 
> 
> 
But the shafting was done by...?

-- 
Moving things in still pictures!

®i©ardo wrote:
> David Hansen wrote:
>> On Tue, 24 Jun 2008 03:23:23 -0700 (PDT) someone who may be John B
>>  wrote this:-
>>
>>> No, as David Hansen says upthread, Prideaux, Anderson and Jukes were
>>> *not* advising the Tories on the ROSCO sale. Rather, having been
>>> excluded from the process, they realised the Tories and their banker
>>> friends were likely to undervalue the ROSCOs and put together
>>> consortia to bid for them, which were ultimately successful.
>>
>> And in doing so they demonstrated the sort of enterprise which the
>> Tories and their "expert" advisors claimed anyone who worked for BR
>> was incapable of demonstrating, as it had been beaten out of them by
>> nasty public ownership.
>>
>> I remember the time. A whole variety of cruel words were used by the
>> representatives of the brave new world to describe those who worked
>> for the nasty public owned organisations. Fossils is one of the more
>> polite words they used.
>>
>> The brave new world was to be full of thrusting (a word they used a
>> lot) people who would show the fossils how to do things. The
>> arrogant words of the privateers soon turned to dust though, long
>> before the nadir of the panic response to Hatfield. Along with the
>> poll tax people should never let the Tories forget rail
>> privatisation and neither should people let the Labour bunch forget
>> that they did nothing about it (other than let John Prescott bumble
>> around for a while) when they should have.
>>
>> Some things are getting better now, though the system we now have is
>> very different to the mess the Tories created. Shafting large
>> numbers of small Railtrack investors, often railway staff, was a
>> particularly foolish way of making the improvement which Network
>> Rail is.
>>
>>
>>
> But the shafting was done by...?

Politicians (of both persuasions) and civil servants.

Have you forgotten  to incite violenece against someone today?

Or are you back on the pills?