UK government to sell Eurostar stake before general election

[Esseesse]

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/oct/13/go...

This strikes me as very short-termist. Why sell off Eurostar? £300M is pocket change. I agree with privatization and competition in general, but not in areas where it isn't realistically possible for there to actually be any competition.

[Esseesse]

From another article about this...

Independent said:

City adviser UBS made millions from Royal Mail and is advising on the Eurostar sale.

Excuse me if I'm wrong, but aren't UBS Swiss? Or are they HQ'd in London and pay taxes here?

[Esseesse]

Wyvern971 said:

Cheese Mechanic said:

Governements should keep to governing the country, not running railways and etc, they only make a fk of things. Sell it off.

Not being funny, but do you think any private company would have even attempted to build the channel tunnel?

As a side note as it's effectively a monopoly due to lack of competition (as are most rail networks) how does privatizing it make sense?

There's no way it'd be allowed to go bust, so guess who pays for a bail out if it gets screwed up by a private company?

^^ This.

No railways should be privatised, because it's not realistic that someone might decide to build and run a competing line. Just like how roads should not be privatised.

[Esseesse]

The whole point about privatisation and the free market is that if someone is making a stack of money, competitors will be encouraged to setup competing businesses to make some of that money too. As competition increases companies will have to work hard to streamline their businesses to stay afloat (this is the advantage over public sector which has much less incentive). This means in theory you should be left with only efficient companies providing a good (or at least acceptable) service for reasonably low cost to the user.

There is no chance of the above happening with Eurostar, or the other railways in the UK.

Edited by Esseesse on Monday 13th October 12:19

[Esseesse]

Cheese Mechanic said:

The channel tunnel was built by private companies underwritten by Gov't.

That sounds like it was built by the government, wrapped up in such a way to keep 'privatise everything' Tory voters happy to me.

Private sector companies that rely 100% on government contracts are in fact the public sector pretending not to be.