Your Leader column (16th February,2018) attributed the current popularity of nationalisation to the electorate being "weary of substandard service", particularly on the railways, and the "excessive prices imposed by many private companies". What it omitted was the repugnance aroused by obscenely high levels of pay awarded to CEOs of private companies, resulting in increased pay ratios; in 2016, for every £1 the average employee of a FTSE company was paid, their CEO received £129. To make matters worse, the CEO`s pay is often unjustly awarded, either after making "efficiency" savings, by closing branches and sacking workers, or after initiating short-termist policies, which see share values increase but little or no investment in technology and training to improve productivity.
There is also the issue of awareness; the British public know not only, as the Leader said, how the "state across Europe plays an indispensable role in ownership and strategy", but how nationalised foreign companies profit from their involvement in British transport and energy. Having a Tory government which refuses to contemplate state control, but allows British companies to be run by foreign states is plainly idiotic, and has to stop.
Nationalising railways and utilities would allow pay ratios to be improved, and set an example for all private companies. Failure by many to follow suit would then provide moral justification, if any was needed, for Labour`s aim to tax high earners more heavily, with a 60% rate surely not out of the question; under Margaret Thatcher`s government, the top income tax rate was at that level until the 1988 budget!
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