tsubaki
Player Valuation: £90m
He does bear the lions share of the blame - but the rot began under Major with the "top-up loans", which were always intended to be a precursor of what followed.
Current Affairs War on Socialism
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He does bear the lions share of the blame - but the rot began under Major with the "top-up loans", which were always intended to be a precursor of what followed.
I think this is an excellent time for us to start questioning the status-quo of the entirety of our socioeconomic systems, so I welcome ideological attacks.
zzr45
#MURDERINGSCUM
Between your ‘the only good Tory is a dead Tory’ and this fresh call for ‘attacks’ one sincerely hopes you’re on some kind of watch list.
Probably, mate.
In seriousness, if you take 80% of the stuff I say here seriously then more fool you.
zzr45
#MURDERINGSCUM
Agent Blue
Player Valuation: £10m
Pray tell me Mr Blue how long have you had this "Snowflake" problem. There is plenty of information regarding Socialism on the interweb maybe you could have a look.
Would you advocate a return to the Workhouse or that we remove safety guards from machinery in order to improve profitability. Maybe we could tap into that much underused labour market of the under 10's in the name of profit, chimney's don't sweep themselves you know.
Why would you not think that public ownership and regulation of production and distribution for the benefit of society as a whole is not a good idea.
Deregulation and a "free" market economy has driven the country to bankruptcy for the past ten years, present and a long time into the future. There are a small cabal of people with most of the wealth "who have had the most pampered lives in the history of the UK"......it is time to redistribute this for the good of our society.
Agent Blue
Player Valuation: £10m
Is that the Richard Branson who no longer lives here, owns a rail franchise that failed to pay 2.1 billion to the exchequer recently and was then allowed to bid for another rail franchise? and is also making inroads at the NHS. Good call to involve him in the nations health.
I'm 99% certain that Branson has no involvement in Virgin Health at all. They license the brand name but very little else has any input from Branson himself.
zzr45
#MURDERINGSCUM
That’ll be 2bn that Stagecoach didn’t pay? The only involvement Virgin had was letting them run under the Virgin brand. The fact they were losing money hand over fist sort of defeats the ‘evil billionaires bleeding the country dry’ argument as well. The government did a number there.
Agent Blue
Player Valuation: £10m
Is that not in itself tax evasion. The amount that Branson charges Virgin Health is offset against tax, that is how multinationals move their total tax bill offshore. An offshore company is set up to administrate the use of the Virgin Health brand and the actual company providing the service has to pay Branson for using the Virgin brand, the company doing the administration is usually based in a tax haven and pays tax there at their rates as this is where the company is based.
Agent Blue
Player Valuation: £10m
Pls see above!
zzr45
#MURDERINGSCUM
Slightly different. Stagecoach were cutting Virgin in on their deal to run under the Virgin liveries.
Agent Blue
Player Valuation: £10m
I think you may find that Stagecoach is a 90% shareholder in Virgin Trains East Coast and aren't cutting them in. I suspect when Virgin Trains were unable to cough up said amount (1.6 bn my figures were wrong) Mr Branson was paid for using the Virgin brand BEFORE Virgin Trains announced they couldn't or wouldn't pay up. I suspect this as the franchise was called Virgin Trains and not Stagecoach Trains therefore using the Virgin brand name and as such would have had to pay Mr Branson. Unless of course he allowed them to use the Virgin brand for free.
Very patriotic man Mr Branson....ahem!
Very patriotic man Mr Branson....ahem!
tsubaki
Player Valuation: £90m
They weren't "losing money hand over fist" - they would have done, had the deal ran the whole term, but the actual losses they had incurred were relatively minor (they probably paid around £500 million for the time they were in charge but were on the hook for at least another £2 billion up to 2023).
As for the "Government did a number there" - what actually happened was that they had a stable firm (East Coast, a brand run by the Government's own Directly Operated Railways) running the East Coast trains competently, performance was good, the services were popular and well-used, they were putting a realistic amount of money back into the Treasury and generally not causing a fuss.
Obviously that ran entirely counter to Government policy so they pushed them out of business (they weren't even allowed to bid for the franchise when it was offered up again and DOR itself was scrapped in favour of paying a consortium a lot more to act as operator of last resort), had a franchise competition that cost at least £10 million, and now VTEC has failed they are coming up with some absurd new scheme where firms that couldn't be trusted to run just the trains are now going to be trusted to run the trains and everything else.
magicjuan
Player Valuation: £60m
This is the internet, we're all on a watch list.
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