@charliestyr

I don't really view it as a 'tax dodge'. One of the purposes of tax is to assist government policies - for example increasing tax on cigarettes to discourage smoking, or exempting electric cars from road tax to help make them more attractive than fossil fuel cars.

It is worth noting though that 'indirect ownership' models like employee trusts are often viewed with suspicion by the co-operative movement - for example on the grounds that the trustees, although mandated to act in what they see as the interests of employees, may not be elected, or subject to re-election, by the employees.

My own view, however, is that co-operative models are not always appropriate - their basic requirement, for example, is a long-term stable and engaged membership constituency, so unsuited to sectors with high staff turnover. I therefore tend to think there is no one-size-fits-all organisational model, and diversity of options is a strength, even while I think the remote shareholder, investment-led structure of anglosphere big business has been a disaster for people and planet.

@YorksBylines

It's very clear that Thatcherism's privatisation of municipal bus companies failed completely (like water and indeed I think every other such privatisation) - and indeed that the increasing urgency of action on climate-ecological breakdown makes public investment in and strategic control of public transport ever more vital.

But the green/left needs to think it through carefully. I was centrally involved in the local bus company buy-outs that in the late 1980s and 90s were a local response to the forced privatisation (I subsequently wrote 'Turnarounds - A Development Worker's Guide to Democratic Conversions & Buyouts' for the Open University and the Industrial Common Ownership Movement - material which later formed the basis of 'Delivering Employee & Community Buyouts', which is still available free online - https://bccm.coop/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Delivering-EBO-Guide.pdf .)

Both local municipalities and trade unions tended to insist on local ownership, while industry experts tended to favour much larger regional structures, predicting that national private bus companies would out-compete too locally focused bus services - which is exactly what happened, and what produced the current bus chaos in the UK.