(btw, there's a small Cultural Studies paper waiting to be written on names - how the Amalgamated Union of Wire-Drawers, Fettlers and Allied Trades turns in thirty years into something called "Together" or "Unity", British Insulated Cable and Radio Limited into "Xantippe" or "Xenith", and the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment via "Defence Research Agency" into "QinetiQ". The key being that the old, wordy, literate names actually described what the organisation did, the new ones conceal it and are post-literate, logos in letter form)
UPDATE - can there have been a worse government since the Baldwin/Chamberlain administration ? I'm speechless.
The Treasury is considering privatising other state assets in what critics have called a recession "fire sale". These include:
*Ordnance Survey
*The Met Office
*The Forestry Commission
*The Queen Elizabeth II conference centre in Westminster
*The Covent Garden Market Authority
*The Royal Mint
*The Tote
*Buildings owned by British Waterways
*British Nuclear Fuel's stake in uranium enrichment company Urenco
*The Oil & Pipeline Agency, which manages the UK's underground network of fuel distribution pipelines.
Why don't they sell the Palace of Westminster to Donald Trump and lease it back as well ?
12 comments:
They're kicking around the idea of flogging parts of the Post Office off to a 'foreign buyer'.
Presumably a few million quid for the govt to invest & spend wisely (yeah, right).
But the parts that are sold?
If, unsurprisingly, they are profitable sectors then those profits will be leaving the country.
If they arent profitable they will be sold with the proviso that the state will subsidise them to some degree- as happened with the railways. So instead of profits leaving the UK it will be taxpayers money being sent away.
This leads onto the frankly staggering news that the govt may chip in £1,000,000,000 to help prop up Land Rover/Jaguar, now owned by Indian company Tata.
This is the same govt which wasnt willing to stump cash in 2005 to keep the British owned Rover group afloat.
Bastards.
Isn't what they are doing illegal under the "Nuclear non-proliferation treaty" which apparently says countries arent allowed to 'share'?
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How can they possibly do such a thing as sell of nuclear weapon assets without approval of parliament surely that can't be right? there must be few more important hard issues than nuclear weapons.
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Yeah Anon 1:10 and didn't Tata only pay 1 billion for Land Rover ?
So if the government gives them 1 billion they effectively get it for nothing, something funny going on here.
The list represents a last desperate car boot sale.
When that lot is gone what happens then? One last splurge of tax concessions, what?
There is a bit left in the cupboard though. Ive come up with these, if you are reading Mr Brown
Motorways - sold off, to become toll roads.
BBC - Got to be worth a few bob.
Parts of the NHS.
Council housing - still quite a bit of that.
Anyone think of anything else?
How about Northern Rock?
Laban,
I posted recently on the urgency with which Mandelson was reported to be considering flogging off the Royal Mail from the back of a red van. The timing with which this most fanatical of globalists was appointed to supervise the British business sector makes one very suspicious indeed.
This could be the largest exrcise on 'disaster capitalism' that the world has ever seen.
If only they'd do the sensible thing and move the capital to Berwick, there'd be lots more property to sell off in London.
Actually Anonymous, I like the idea of raising capital by selling off the motorways for the new owners to raise revenues by making them toll roads. Why not?
And the notion of selling off the BBC positively sparkles. (My own preference, as I have stated many times, would be to dynamite it and leave it as a brownfield site for several years; but I also like the idea of this horrible organisation being subject to the marketplace.)
"The Definitive Polka Dot", how is it capitalism to 'privatise' the road system?
For market capitalism to work there has to be freedom of choice. The motorway owners would be able to charge whatever they want driving up the prices of everything that needs delivering. It would cause chaos as trucks and vans and anyone forced to travel for business reasons tried to take alternative routes.
I mentioned selling off the motorways, turning them into toll roads. Im not criticising that idea, just pointing out that there isnt much left to sell.
Flogging the Beeb. Sounds great but I fear its institutional leftism would mostly remain. Broadcast media everywhere is in the hands of our enemies. We have a 'choice', the left/liberal BBC or right/liberal Fox and so on. Ownership seems to be secondary to the values of those who control the media.
For myself, fuddy duddy that I am, I would prefer most of the institutions in the list to remain under British state ownership. Post Office ditto. Motorways however could be privatised without much fuss.
A while back Gordon Brown had a modern "Domesday Book" of all current UK assets written. I said at the time that the UK finances were obviously in trouble and he was looking to see what collateral he could raise. My guess is that the idea is not so much to sell these things as to raise the possibility that they could be sold so that they can be used as collateral against government bonds, which the government is currently struggling to sell.
It has to be said that they are utterly, disgracefully corrupt. It is an attempt by the back door to fund thei continuing debts whilst not raising taxes and not cutting spending. All about "jam today" in the hope of winning an election tomorrow. They don't give one damn about this country and its people, not one damn.
They are betraying all of us for a handful of silver.
It is amusing that selling off the BBC and the NHS have been ruled out (obviously for partisan reasons), and yet the Labour government has got the country into the position that really it is only selling these that will raise any worthwhile funds. Ironic that after spending billions on the NHS to tart up its buildings it will probably be handed to the some US health company in a forced sale of government assets.
It's not all Labour's fault.
There are probably EU directives driving some of these. Certainly that is the case with the Post Office.
And don't point out to me that the French just ignore directives they don't like, we all know that already.
Better off out!
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