You can say that last point about any government of the past twenty years at least.
As for the railways, the way he apparently wants to do it is to roll the franchises back into public ownership as they expire, so the likes of Abellio, DB and the rest would slowly go away and they'd be left with only the ROSCOs to deal with (the firms that actually own the trains). This is the best and cheapest legal way of renationalizing it, and once you get to that point then the likelyhood is that it will be run competently goes up because there will be no more need to divert attention and money to the system of franchising, it can all be focused on the railway.
Black cat, white cat - so long as it catches mice, it's a good cat. You can have a more state-driven approach to rail like France, or more competition between private firms as in Germany or Switzerland. The UK monopoly franchise system, on the other hand, demonstrably does not catch mice, though it spends more money than anyone else in pursuit of them.
What the UK really lacks is investment. Northern Rail relies on trains which even Iran has discontinued as obsolete. Productivity outside London
is lower than just about every other major European city, and that includes Southern and Eastern Europe. It is not a coincidence that that the UK is also, since Thatcher, the most centralised country in Europe, and the most committed to austerity. Inter- and especially intra-city transit is deplorable; Leeds, home to 700,000, literally does not have a mass transit system (the Tories scrapped the last plan in the 90s) - it is by far the biggest city in Europe without one.
Private enterprise in this country is totally disinterested in investment, even with the BoE all but on its knees begging them with the lowest interest rates in over 100 years. Private firms are not even bothered, never mind capable, of developing Britain's infrastructure. Instead, they settle for M&A, share-buybacks, and stripping each other for parts, a la GKN. Likewise, the Tory government, again completely disregarding monetary cues, is at this point little more than a suicide pact between a small cult of useful idiot Ayn Rand fanboys, and the most venal and self-absorbed class of rich people outside Russia. Both are delighted to bring the country to its knees in order to further pad offshore accounts already containing more than could be spent in generations. And neither has any interest in addressing the productivity/investment problem.
As was the case here after the war, in China and all the Asian tigers, and in every country - America, Germany, France, Japan - which has ever successfully industrialised, the state plays the leading role in planning and stimulating development, and Labour is the only party seriously proposing this.
The DfT already micromanages rail transit, down to details like the number of trains that can hold a catering trolley, or the number of
legally permitted on-board washrooms. They just do so ineptly, for the most part, due to imposed ideological reasons designed to suit corporate franchisees. Nationalising rail would in practise represent much more a change in how the trains are run than who they are run by.
I'm actually agonstic about nationalisation, btw, but nothing could possibly be worse than the current system, which, as usual in Britain, somehow combines the worst of both the public and private sector.
