Parliament opened on Tuesday with its time honoured rituals with the Kings Speech - we're still getting used to that term after decades of a Queen - which include at a rough count some thirty-five Bills the incoming Labour wishes to bring before both Houses of Parliament to turn into Acts of Parliament.
It's quite probably some will end up being withdrawn, other put to one side while the propositions are worked on and resubmitted.
Other matters could be subject to legal and other challenges.
One that does interests me is the intention to Nationalize the railways.
Speaking as a conservative, it always puzzled me why under the Major conservative government even bothered with it as it was accepted from 1947 from nationalization from the Big Four by all the parties it worked better whatever we might think of the merits or otherwise of the Beeching Report.
Was it just a way for the Treasury to just offload a chunk of the public sector borrowing requirement so get way with running with less?
Trains ownership got seperated from track, stations and routes so on winning a contract for a service, that provider having said what the service would be like had to hire the trains from another body and if you had an accident repairs were more complicated because all the bits you need to clear the line were owned by different people and not where they were needed.
So some sort of integration or re-integration is needed and nationalization is one way of achieving this although my understanding it will be a matter of taking over when contracts come up for renewal so it's likely to be patchy until chunks are taken over.
You might say"Why not just take it all over"?
Well that would be quicker but you can be sure they'd be legal challenges, insistence on compensating shareholders which would have to be paid for by public funds which we're a bit low on.
I'm interested to see how this works out as the year or so moves on.
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