I don’t know what the fuss is about. The railways are nationalised in all but name now anyway. Network Rail has been nationalised for twenty years and its debts (more than £50bn) now appear on public accounts. Many of the Train Operating Companies (TOCs) were in a bad way before the pandemic. Some franchises were surrendered part way through with one particularly damaging collapse (LNER). The pandemic finished them off as going concerns with their franchises being suspended. The DfT currently meets the operating costs of running the railways and the TOCs receive a fixed fee to cover their costs.
Privatising the railways was a good idea but the model adopted to achieve it was a disaster. The biggest mistake was the abandonment of an Integrated infrastructure and train operating model. This had served the railways more or less satisfactorily since their birth, and certainly very well between Grouping in 1923 and Nationalisation in 1948 – a period that was probably the finest in Britain’s railway history. The unsatisfactory model was forced on the government by the EU, under the EU Directive 91/440. This stipulated that the organisations running railway infrastructure and those running trains must be separate. A further directive – The Single European Railway Directive – was launched in 2012 and this stipulated that all networks must be openly available to all operators across the EU. Interestingly this led the UK’s rail unions to call for their members to vote to Leave the EU. A bit off-topic here but it indicates, to those in any doubt, the pernicious influence the EU has on its member nations' affairs.
A review of Britain’s rail strategy was begun in 2018 following the disastrous fallout from the timetable change. The pandemic threw much of the plans that came out of that review into doubt. A “30 year strategic plan” is due for publication later this year and hopefully that will garner the best from privatisation and ditch the worst.