The first time I got on a Northern Train, I was rained on inside the carriage thanks to a hole in the roof. Virgin Trains will forever hold a place in my heart as the worst rail firm I ever had the misfortune to use, but friends commuting daily using Northern hated the company beyond all measure — for being late, too infrequent, of poor quality, and, as with all rail travel in the United Kingdom, far too expensive.

So the announcement that the Conservative government is renationalizing the franchise after repeated failures has been greeted with joy by many. Earlier this month, Conservative transport minister Grant Shapps announced that Virgin would be stripped of its franchise. Then came the sudden news it was to be renationalized. The second biggest commuter rail service, South Western Railway, is also under threat of renationalization due to appalling performance and the constant threat of strike action resulting from its treatment of staff and the degradation of pay and working conditions.

After all the pre-election fearmongering that Jeremy Corbyn and Labour would nationalize every company under the British sky as a prelude to bringing your whole family into public ownership, the Tories have been remarkably quick to renationalize, and to talk about the prospect of further nationalization. This is, in some respects, unsurprising: during the election, Boris Johnson showed that he didn’t care much about truth or intellectual honesty, only smearing Labour and ramping up votes by sowing division and fear in the electorate. Haranguing his Tories for a policy U-Turn won’t matter much, because they care about neither policy, U-turns, nor their public image. Labour’s shadow transport secretary, Andy McDonald, was circumspect, stating, “All failing rail contracts should be taken into public control as a major step towards uniting track and train,” and pointed out that the government could have stepped in far sooner to hold Arriva, the company running Northern Rail, to account. Arriva also sued the government, as many other private firms are doing — costing the taxpayer millions more due to Tory incompetence in addition to the ludicrous privatized system.