Talk:Privatisation of British Rail/Archives/2016

Actual reasons for privatisation?

The background section goes into some history but doesn't give actual reasons as to why British Rail has to be privatised.

This would be a very interesting aspect to cover as there's talk of privatisation of the SNCB/NMBS, the National Railway Company of Belgium due to it having accumulated near €5 billion euros of debt.

"The debt could bring about a privatisation of the SNCB" (Google translation)

--JamesPoulson (talk) 16:36, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

It's an interesting question, I don't think you will find it easy to obtain neutral sources though. Considering the debate that goes on about it, there are relatively few books about it - Christian Wolmar's and Terry Gourvish's books would be a starting point. Probably a combination of wanting to reduce the burden on the government through subsidy, improve the public's view of the service by getting companies who are generally better at branding in and competition for passengers going and (what I would cynically say was the biggest factor) having someone to blame other than the government when things went wrong. Absolutelypuremilk (talk) 19:04, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

FWIW, I added a line about what the 1992 Tory manifesto specifically said re. motive. I see no issue with neutrality, it's trivially easy to give all sides of the story and let people decide for themselves who was right - e.g. the Tories said it was to improve the service, Labour said it was to crush the unions, the unions said it was to steal public money, the private companies said it was to improve the service and make them rich in the process, etc, etc. I've heard it said that Wolmar is anti-privatisation, but if people can source that, this qualifier can be included in the article. If they can't, well, nobody can argue that he's not a notable commentator, so his view should rightly be included here anyway, even if it is quite scathing. You only get into neutrality problems if you start to include the opinion of people who have no business being recorded here as influential, or if you include notable people's opinions in a cherry picked way (i.e. if we were to include Wolmar saying it was a terrible idea, without giving any detail about any positives he might have also highlighted). Kristian Jenn (talk) 18:05, 31 January 2016 (UTC)

Hatnote

Kristian Jenn, you removed the hatnote: "This article is about the historical process of the privatisation of British Rail. For a discussion of whether the privatisation had a positive or negative impact, see Impact of the privatisation of British Rail."

From WP:Hatnote, hatnotes should be used to help readers find a page they may have been looking for. As the effect of privatisation is a very hot political topic, I think many people will be looking to find out what its effects were and the political discussion surrounding them, probably much more so than would want to find information on the historical process of privatisation, which is fairly technical. Absolutelypuremilk (talk) 17:51, 31 January 2016 (UTC)

As I said, it was my belief these notes are only supposed to be used in cases of complete confusion - i.e. someone looking for a completely different topic, and not cases where they are likely to find what they are looking for by simply reading the page they arrived at. If we were to second guess all the things people might be wanting to know when they arrive here, the note could be very long indeed and contain numerous links, by which time they could have just scanned the article, no? And looking at WP:Hatnote, linking to related articles is given as one of the examples of how not to use them (WP:RELATED). Kristian Jenn (talk) 17:57, 31 January 2016 (UTC)