How can this be?

A piece in the Observer at the weekend noted that:

Britain’s rail fares may not be the most prohibitively expensive in Europe, as some claim – at least for those with prescience, funds for a season ticket, and wanting a return journey. But the cost for people who need to travel at short notice or fixed times, potentially forfeiting a week’s average take-home pay for an intercity trip feeds the sense of injustice.

Reviews have failed to nail how to get UK rail costs down to the level of Europe’s state railways – although the 2011 McNulty report noted the high profits of rolling stock companies, and generous salaries. The perception of private sector efficiency versus British Rail clunkiness is deeply ingrained – even though polling suggests most people would favour renationalisation, and trains have run up the east coast mainline equally fast under public and private ownership in the past few years.

But wait, wasn’t one argument put forward for Brexit that Britain would be able to have nationalised and state endeavours again? And yet, as noted many times already on this site, many EU states have… well, state-owned railways. And as the for the idea renationalisation is impossible under EU rules there is this which suggests that it would in fact be very straightforward to bring the railways in the UK back into state ownership of one form or another (and by the by it would be possible as the linked article shows to use Brexit to forge a close relationship to the EU/soft Brexit and negotiate exemptions allowing a straight renationalisation). Which does raise the question how much about the EU some people actually know?