Private profit

Brian Monteith makes a halfhearted attack on Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn (Scotsman, 12 February), but destroys any credibility he has by defending privatisation, saying : “This is not to say that privatisation is an unmitigated success.” What an understatement that is.

Let us look at the terrible mess the Government is making with its policy of rail privatisation. For a second time running, the Tories have allowed the private operators of the East Coast rail route to crash out of the contract they signed to run the route. They got the contract by bidding £3 billion for the right to make money out of travellers. If they had found the contract to be lucrative, they would have expected its terms to stand and they would have made a mint, yet because they aren’t making a success of it they coolly walk away. Profit is privatised but the privateers walk away from the losses and hand them to the taxpayer.

It’s just like the banks, which paid tens of billions of pounds to their shareholders and bonuses to their executives, yet when their greed and stupidity caused a global economic crisis, it was taxpayers who had to fork out and public services had to be slashed to pay for it.

Or like collapsed construction giant Carillion, which paid out £217 million more in dividends to shareholders in 2012-2016 than it made in profits, part of which was money from the tories’ outsourcing of public services to Carillion, yet has left its 27,000 pensioners with a £990 million deficit in the pension fund – which will be partly funded by a levy on all other pension schemes in Britain. The sooner Labour return to power to end this privatisation nonsense, the better.

PHIL TATE Craiglockhart Road, Edinburgh