Rail fares to rise by 3.1% in January

Actually to follow you argument to its logical end, I have claimed that its easier than other jobs. Therefore to fulfil your requirements I'd also have to have "extensive experience" of every other job possible to in order to make a fair comparison.

Obviously, I am able to make claims based on non-experiential sources. The is done in, for example, government, or by chief executives of large companies, every single day.

I still await what experiences you have to counter this.

Not a train driver. I fail to see any further relevance.

It is when its the general public funding the lavish wages! Nurses get the train too, you know. If a nurse spends £2k of her take-home pay on a season ticket £500 of that is going on staff wages.

Its a contributor. Perhaps 5%, which is loads. If Tesco lost 5% of its revenues it'd go out of business.

I've never been a train driver, nor have I had similar experiences to it. I'm not in a position to judge the difficulty of it and I'm certainly not in a position to state it's one of the easiest jobs. The same applies to you, unless you have such experience. How do you know it's so easy if you have never done it?

You're the one who said it was one of the easiest jobs, the onus is on you to prove it. I haven't dismissed anyone's job as really easy.

Well if you're going to rudely dismiss other people's jobs as really easy and argue they should have their pay reduced then perhaps you should share what your job is. Office job?

Of course, we should fund the service through taxation so those on lower wages have cheaper fares.

Actually Tesco's did survive losing a lot of their revenue over recent years. We need serious change to the service. Cutting drivers salaries will not solve the issues. Other countries run far better nationalised joined up services than we do.

This is boring. You have no points except 'nationalisation will solve all problems' with absolutely zero further justification. About the only thing we know nationalisation in Europe has done that would be helpful - keeping wages sensible - you just dismiss.

Good day.

So despite rudely dismissing other people's jobs as really easy, without any experience of them, you won't answer a simple question about what it is that you do. Quite telling really.

I've given plenty of reasons. As have other posters which have little to do with wages. In other countries the whole service is far more joined up, you don't have the tracks owned publicly and franchises owned privately. You don't have private firms taking money out of the system and ramping up prices.

You only have to look at the nationalised services in other countries and even our own such as TFL to see the difference in public v private provision. Why shouldn't the service be subsidised by taxpayers?

And for the record, in 2015 Tesco lost 6.4 bn and survived. Though I'm not sure what your point regarding Tescos even was.

This is correct. The problem is that our system is being milked for profit taking and shareholder dividends at loads more levels than in other developed countries. Most states are sensible enough to realise that (a) railways are a net benefit, (b) that they need subsidies and if private ownership then heavily managed and (c) that they require expert national planning and coordination. The UK has the worst thing in the world, a series of protected private monopolistic operators milking the system like a cashcow, a government that pretends it's all fine whilst protecting the monopolists and controlling it with random, whimsical and stupid decision making and a long suffering travelling public paying through the nose.

Meanwhile Luxembourg have just made all trains, trams and buses free at the point of use. It's almost as if they regard public transport as a public sevice rather than a private cash cow.

Meanwhile Luxembourg have just made all trains, trams and buses free at the point of use. It's almost as if they regard public transport as a public sevice rather than a private cash cow.

It's a tiny place, like I said earlier this might make some sense in a city state but not in a big country.

Also free transport just means someone else pays. Given your reluctance to cut down on any costs like staff, if a similar thing were introduced here taxpayers would instead be paying the huge prices of train tickets.

The price is artificially inflated to pay out all the profit-takers built into the system by neoliberal extremist privatisations based on false models and con tricks by bankers and Tories. A sensibly run system would require a lower subsidy, as it does in other countries.

The price is artificially inflated to pay out all the profit-takers built into the system by neoliberal extremist privatisations based on false models and con tricks by bankers and Tories. A sensibly run system would require a lower subsidy, as it does in other countries.

The three percent?

Perhaps you could give us the figures?

It's a tiny place, like I said earlier this might make some sense in a city state but not in a big country.

Also free transport just means someone else pays. Given your reluctance to cut down on any costs like staff, if a similar thing were introduced here taxpayers would instead be paying the huge prices of train tickets.

What evidence is there of that? Can you name a country with both lower fares and a lower government subsidy to the railways? The UK has the least subsidy per passenger mile in Europe.

There's a lot of Corbyn nonsense going around at the moment, where people are under the impression the price of a ticket is 99% for the private company and 1% to run the railway. If British Rail were brought back tomorrow, not to mention the massive expense of setting the thing up, you'd have the same trains, staff, track, station and all the same costs.

The UK has low subsidies purely because the government have irrationally forced more of the cost onto passengers, yet train travel is a net public good. For example, it diverts people away from the excessively used road network and it reduces pollution. It also enables business to function in large cities, when it would be unworkable without mass transit.

It's not irrational at all, subsidies are poor people paying for rich people to go to work. Like I've said already, rail commuters in the UK are predominantly people going to top jobs in London. They can afford those tickets, and people in northern England should not be paying for them.

You're being rather disingenuous here. Not everyone who works in London is rich or even comfortable. Also it won't be poor people paying for rich people, it will be companies and wealthy individuals subsidising others.

I said predominantly, it's not exactly people on the minimum wage who are commuting into Waterloo and Liverpool Street. If you put taxes up to fund tickets, then everyone will be paying more for a minority of the population that are on the whole on high wages.

A fairer system is to get the people who use the trains to pay, like I've been saying all along.

it will be companies and wealthy individuals subsidising others.

So I take it you've got no ****ing clue how the tax laws here are abused...

...unless you're suggesting that, alongside the colossal upheaval of renationalising the railways for little tangible benefit, we also rewrite every law on the statute book...?