Letter: Gravy train is bad business

The fiasco of rail privatisation is all the more surprising given that it is the work of the Conservative Party, the party of business, with the most experienced financiers and industrialists at its beck and call ("Tax- payer foots pounds 450m bill for rail privatisation advisers", 4 August). However, there is one glimmer of hope in the Porterbrook acquisition by Stagecoach. The payout has been shared by all the staff of this tiny company with its seven-month history, with even the office staff getting close to pounds 500,000 each. Had strict Thatcherite principles been applied, the directors would have divided the pie between themselves and the staff would have got redundancy notices.

Perhaps the most dangerous principle of management to have emerged in Britain is that a company's success is due entirely to the efforts and brilliance of a very few at the top. Only when we can recognise that a company owes its success to all its members will Britain once again build firms that can compete with Eastman Kodak, IBM, Hewlett Packard, Siemens-AEG, Daimler-Benz, BMW and the Japanese Zaibatsu.

Geoff Taylor

Liberal Democrats in

Runnymede & Weybridge,

Surrey