[Tubby Isaacs]

This is a not unimportant railway line. This is terrible.

I'm actually relatively impressed they released this information. Maybe some Tory Svengali wanted to release it to make sinking HS2 look less bad.

[Bones McCoy]

I nicked this off the Guardian comments

This is another of the issues that lays bare the fact that the entire principle behind neoliberalism is based upon bullshit.

Wealth "trickles down" to the rest of us (lies), privatisation is "cheaper and more efficient" (lies) and the private sector sector "promotes competition and therefore innovation" (more lies).

The fact is that the neoliberal model promotes short term profit seeking, nothing more.
So if a cartel of monolithic, monopolistic corporations find it easier to profit from milking its own assets by regurgitating them over and over and over again, then that's what they'll do. And if one of these "agile, innovative start ups" does appear to threaten their market dominance they will either swat them like a fly or absorb them like The Thing (and not even John Carpenter's the Thing...more like the soulless, pointless CGI-infested reboot).

"Innovation" won't even enter into the equation.