"Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?"

Hello, what's this? A fairly mundane photo of the car park at Lancaster station, which is managed by Virgin Trains. Three or four years ago you could park here for £6.50 a day, which was a bit pricey but, you know, nothing to get cross about, and certainly very convenient for catching the train.

Then the price went up to £7.50, which was a bit of a leap if you look at it in percentage terms but we all know that prices go up from time to time. Then the price went up to £9.50 and, today, I saw a sign saying that from February 1st the price will be £10 per day.

That's a 50% increase in a matter of four years.

I suppose that perhaps during that time the running of an unmanned car park has risen in ways I don't understand. Perhaps the price of tarmac is, by some bizarre fluke of chemistry and economics, inversely proportional to the price of oil. Maybe the people at Virgin head office are tearing their hair out at having to impose these price increases on the humble traveller.

Maybe.

Then again, the whole rail privatisation has been - UNARGUABLY - a farce. The only company to return a profit was the East Coast Mainline during the few years that it was returned to public ownership, when it earned the tax payer well in excess of a billion pounds. All of the other rail companies required a government subsidy. That's including Virgin Trains, despite the ownership of arch-entrepreneur Richard Branson.

So, why, you might ask, would the government sell it back into private ownership? The answer is simple; this is government driven by ideology. An ideology that is terrified by and running scared of the same capitalists that it believes facilitate a small state. Why else do they do nothing to confront the banks, and those tax evading big businesses like GSK, Amazon, Starbucks, Google and Apple?

And, sadly, we, the people, seem to have given up. We simply accept this sorry state of affairs, standing by and watching the NHS get sold off to the governments' friends, for example, despite the assurances from that great liar, David Cameron. 

And so it is with this car park, the state of affairs in microcosm: we get told that we have to pay 50% more for something that is no more expensive to run than it was four years ago, just to satisfy the shareholders' lust for dividends. 

Seriously, why aren't we out on the streets?