Chronicles of the pandemic - Great Britain

Just four months ago, and it is as if a century had passed, the topic aroused scandal in the British establishment and among the well-considered. Bringing the railways back under government control, even in part, was among the workhorses of the unfortunate election campaign of Jeremy Corbyn, promoter of a renewed state intervention in economics that made not only the conservatives or liberals of the Kingdom jump, but also the more moderate nomenklatura of its own Labor Party. Ideas blamed as "vetero marxiste", or at least "far left": certainly not feasible.
All forgotten, if only temporarily, because of the coronavirus. Public money, as if by magic, has been found; debt has ceased to be a priority; and it fell to the Tory government of a fierce 'free market' supporter like Boris Johnson, and a Chancellor of the City's Exchequer board like Rishi Sunak, to announce the biggest 'socialist' public money outflow in decades in an emergency; even with the introduction of an extraordinary layoff and the decision to subsidize "for the first time in British history" up to 80% of the wages of private employees sent home as a result of the pandemic.
A turning point to which has been added in the last few hours the provision of the Ministry of Transport which, with a stroke of the pen, has brought back all the railway lines of the country - privatized with highly controversial results in terms of efficiency of trains and costs for islanders since Margaret Thatcher's time - under effective state control.
The decree, made known in a simple press release, suspends - albeit "provisionally" - all licenses with operators, given the collapse of reservations triggered by the health emergency and the need to guarantee the availability of essential services, and only those. Some basic tasks remain in the hands of the managers (such as reservations, which have now collapsed by 70%) and a token on residual revenues. And who knows if, within a few months, the taboo on a partial return to the state railways will still be such.