"Taking back control" by handing control of HS2 to one of three foreign governments

Of all of the Brexit rhetoric the "taking back control" propaganda trope was surely the most powerfully persuasive, but a look at what the Tory government have in store for the HS2 rail project just goes to show how shockingly misleading "taking back control" actually was.

The Tories are planning to spend £56 billion on building the HS2 high speed rail link between London, Birmingham, and the north, but instead of run it ourselves they're immediately going to hand the whole lot over to a rail franchise to run the trains and reap the profits!

The three bidders to run HS2 have been announced and all three are fully, or partially owned by the state rail companies of other countries.

Bidder 1: The Italian state railway + First Group

Bidder 2: The French state railway + Stagecoach & Virgin

Bidder 3: The state owned Hong Kong subway operator and the Chinese Guangshen Railway

Tory privatisation mania

"Why can't Britain run its own high speed railways since it was British cash that built it?" you may well ask, and the answer is that Tory privatisation mania in the 1990s has destroyed the British railway industry, and their ideological hatred of Britain means they will never willingly allow Britain to run its own rail services.

In the 1970s and '80s British Rail led the world in developing high speed rail technology like the tilting train, but Tory under-investment in the 1980s and privatisation mania in the 1990s completely ruined the British train building industry. 

A whopping 1,064 days without a single new train order after privatisation wiped out the train builders and left the nation that invented rail travel dependent upon the Italians to supply us the same kind of tilting trains that we were pioneering in the '70s and '80s.

As a result of Tory privatisation mania 74% of UK rail franchises have now fallen into the hands of foreign state rail companies, that use British commuters and lucrative subsidies from the British government as cash cows to fund improvements to their own rail networks back home.

The Tories have enforced an insane system where the only country that is banned from bidding to run UK rail franchises is the UK!

The Tory party are such economic traitors that they're bitterly opposed to Britain running its own rail services, but happy as Larry for the governments of other countries to step in and milk huge profits out of British rail infrastructure!

Not just rail

The same sorry state of affairs exists with our nuclear industry which the Tories flogged off in 1995. By 2009 the private owners of Britain's nuclear expertise realised there was more cash to be made by flogging the whole lot off to the French government than continuing to run it themselves, so that's what they did.

Britain's nuclear expertise now belongs to France, and that's why the Tories ended up bribing France and China into building us a new nuclear power station at Hinkley Point C rather than building our own. We simply can't build our own because the Tories sold off our ability to do that back in 1995, just like they wrecked our rail expertise in 1994.

"Taking back control" - my arse

The "taking back control" narrative is absurd drivel when the reality is that the Tories flogged off our ability to control our own infrastructure and services during the privatisation mania of the 1990s, so now we're dependent on foreign governments to do the things the economically treasonous Tory party are ideologically opposed to Britain doing for herself.

So next time you hear some delusional Tory Brexiter banging on about sovereignty and "taking back control" just ask them whether they want the oh-so patriotic Tories to hand "control" of HS2 to the government of France, Italy or China and see what their response is ...

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