IT SEEMS an age ago that the Tories claimed to be the voice of the working class. 

Since the fall of the so-called “red wall” when workers lent them their vote to get Brexit done as many saw it, this rotten Tory government has relentlessly attacked workers by slashing services and driving down wages at the height of a cost-of-living crisis. 

In the transport sector the government’s so-called levelling-up agenda has involved bulldozing through a wave of cuts not seen for a generation. 

This involves cutting thousands of jobs, attacking terms and conditions and removing the very concept of ticket offices from the network. 

The government claims that there is no money in the industry, yet international investors are falling over themselves to get in on the act and enjoy the corporate welfare schemes that have become synonymous with privatisation.

The board of Go-Ahead — the operator of Thameslink, Southern and Great Northern — last month agreed to a £650 million takeover by Australian bus operator Kinetic and Spanish infrastructure investor Globalvia.

Meanwhile, FirstGroup — whose lines include Great Western and South Western — is in talks with US-based I Squared Capital, another infrastructure specialist, over a £1.2 billion deal.

And Stagecoach, once the biggest rail operator in the country which now focuses on buses, struck a deal with DWS, the infrastructure investment arm of German lender Deutsche Bank, for £595m in March.

The Stagecoach deal has gone through. Should the other two go ahead, Britain’s railways will not have one domestically owned operator but plenty of foreign state-owned enterprises.

The reason this international feeding frenzy is taking place is due to the fact that transport services will continue to be propped up at great cost to the taxpayer. 

Moreover, the long-awaited reforms included in the so-called Great British Railways package will see the end of the franchising system — where operators pay the government a premium and collect fares — in favour of a concession model whereby fares are passed to the government, which pays the train companies a fixed fee to run services. 

This removes the risk and guarantees a low but steady profit stream extracted from local monopolies, a model that is extremely attractive to a subsector of the global private investments called infrastructure funds.

Infrastructure investors such as Australia’s Macquarie or Brookfield, the Canadian owners of Canary Wharf, prefer protecting the downside of their profit margins rather than maximising the upside.

The environmental agenda also comes into play here as getting people out of their cars and onto buses and trains can deliver handsome profits if you are in the right place at the right time. 

For instance, Kinetic and Globalvia’s takeover of Go-Ahead, as well as DWS and Stagecoach, were also opportunities to make money from buses.

The government’s Bus Back Better published last year pledged £7 billion of funding for the sector. Much of that investment will be sweated by these international investors and recycled into profits. Plus ca change or, as the shareholders may say, trebles all round.