Do you even listen to how ridiculously pathetic you sound? Labour won. The fact it eats you up inside enough to write all that codswallop is just a bonus.
What that does of course is to conveniently ignore that, had there been no Brexit candidate in 2019 the Tory vote in Hartlepool would have been boosted by the 25% taken by Richard "Tice but dim". All gt at happened at the 2021 by election was that the anti Labour vote combined. In truth the three Lib Dem wins, good as they are, have all been in seats that Labour could never win. What happened in Devon was effectively the ant Tory vote coalescing around the LD candidate - aided by some strong anti Brexit feeling amongst farmers being shafted by a policy that they thought they liked, only to find that Project Fear was a reality. By elections invariably bring reduced majorities as all voters stay at home to an extent without the publicity surrounding a General Election. What is remarkable is the willingness of Labour voters to support any anti Tory candidate. This doesn't bode well for Tubs de Pfeffel, if indeed he is still in post come the next GE.
Don’t stop him mate he’s on a roll. Wait till he gets to percentages and fractions, it will blow your mind!
There are 22 railway franchises in the UK but several of them are operated by the same companies and a couple of them have been taken over by the Public Sector Ownership Group (PSOG, effectively the government). I looked for 2021 figures before tax. I spent a couple of hours trawling company reports, which will be a couple of hours more than any of those imbeciles on Twatter just picking big numbers out of the air. Scotrail lost £26m in 2021 and has been taken over by the Scottish government with disastrous operational and financial consequences. The Caledonian Sleeper franchise lost £3.9m in 2021. Transport for Wales Rail is a part of Transport for Wales, owned by the Welsh government. East Midlands Railway (run by Abellio) made a profit of £9.1m in 2021 on operating costs of £428m. Arriva’s 2021 report is not due out until July and, for obvious reasons, it made a £66m loss in 2020. It operates the Chiltern Railways, CrossCountry and Northern Trains franchises, the latter of which is heavily subsidised. London North Eastern Railway (LNER) made a profit of £1.28m in 2021 on operating costs of £693.3m. First Group subsidiary First Rail operates four franchises: Great Western Railway, Avanti West Coast, South Western Railway and TransPennine Express; as well as Hull Trains. First Rail made a profit of £108.1m on operating costs of £3,619.9m in 2021. West Midlands Trains operates three franchises: the one bearing its name, West Midlands Railway and London Northwestern Railway. It made a profit of £105.2m on operating costs of £561m in 2021, which definitely makes it look like a business worth running with an 18 per cent profit compared to First Rail’s paltry 2.9 per cent. Greater Anglia is run by Dutch state concern Nederlandse Spoorwegen and Abellio; and they report in Euros. In 2021 they made €10.4m profit on operating costs of €675.4m but they did receive €253.9m of government income, which I expect that everyone outside of Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire will not be happy about – the taxpayer picked up more than a third of their costs. The Southeastern franchise ended in October 2021 under a financial cloud (they owed TfL several millions) and is now operated by PSOG; so I have been unable to find the 2021 financials. It was operated by Go-Ahead. Go-Ahead and Keolis operate a partnership that runs Thameslink, Southern, Great Northern and Govia Thameslink Railway but I cannot find results for just Keolis UK in 2021, the French parent company is ostensibly SNCF and the last results I can find posted were for 2020. So it would seem that the only franchise making fantastic profits is West Midlands Trains whilst it is questionable that Greater Anglia should be allowed to make any. Of course the Left just hate anyone making any profit even if the financials show that the profits being made are pretty meagre. Who would really want to run a near £700m business like LNER for less than 1 per cent profit?
I can read how stupid your comments are but you are too stupid to realise that I cannot possibly “listen” to the written word. Your original comment to which I responded was wrong and now you are just obfuscating (I know you do not know that word and are too stupid to look it up). Labour ‘won’ by haemorrhaging fewer votes than the Conservatives (another big word there). So Starmer was not a vote winning attribute when he visited Wakefield – just as the article in the Guardian suggested. I have seen a photograph of a man in the street there offering him a lemon. They mocked him. At least he did not try going into a pub this time. What a leader, what a party.
Here it is, what Mick Lynch actually said: Rail strikes: Top train firm paid shareholders £500m last year | openDemocracy I must point out though that £16bn was pumped into the system to enable the TOCs to be run on a management fee basis, and not so the TOC's could make a profit through the farebox. It's how LNER has been run for years now, even before the pandemic, and really how a company like Northern, based around the five TPEs across the Pennine belt, has been run since privatisation. The old model of privatisation for the old Inter City companies that rely primarily on business and leisure travel was broken before the pandemic - companies have been handing back the keys on those for years now. So, in effect, the whole railways are nationalised, but they effectively have privatised directors and shareholders to pay on top of what was the old BR sectorised model anyway. Oh, and those companies as more than often give a nice donation to the Tory Party. 'Natch.