[DemolitionRed]

...Britain

I am so sorry now that I fell for the great Thatcher-Reagan promise. I can’t deny that I did. I believed all that stuff about privatisation and free trade and the unrestrained market. I think I may even have been taken in by the prophecies of a great share-owning democracy.

How I miss the old names of trusted brands, and the knowledge that these things had been made for generations by my fellow countrymen.

But the new broom swept, and it swept pretty clean. In towns I know well, car assembly lines, railway workshops, glassworks engineering plants, chocolate factories vanished or shrank to nothing.

A journey across the heart of England, once an exhilarating vista of muscular manufacturing, especially glorious by night, turned into archaeology. Now, if it looked like a factory, it was really a ruin.

Someone usually pops up at this stage and says that we still manufacture a lot. If you say so, but then why are the drug-dealers so busy in our new factory-free industrial areas, and why can I never buy anything that was made here, except from absurdly expensive luxury shops?

Why are our warships made of foreign steel? Why are the few factories that do exist almost always foreign-owned, their fate decided far away by people who don’t much care about this country?

And why is our current-account deficit with the rest of the world the worst it’s ever been in peacetime, and nearly as bad as it was during the Great War that first bankrupted this country a century ago?

If it’s all been so beneficial, why do so many of the containers that arrive in British ports, full of expensive imports, leave this country empty?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/ar...#ixzz44mkCcbPU

This comes from arch right-wing Daily Mail columnist Peter Hitchens.... Now let’s see the Mail as a whole follow suit.

[Kizzy]

Are the scales finally falling from the eyes of the former elitist? Hallefrigginglujah.

[Mystic Mock]

Privitisation isn't a bad thing if the country is struggling a little bit in the sense of sell a few properties and then try to get back on track by paying off whatever debt we've got to pay off.

The problem with the situation that we're in now is that we've got next to nothing left to sell off, and all of our future generations are gonna feel it for probably 4 or 5 decades before this country sees itself generating a lot of money back into the country through our own homegrown businesses.

[DemolitionRed]

"These are public assets belonging to the taxpayer, held in trust for the future for the benefit of the many, not for the financial gain of a rich city elite".
McCluskey trade union secretary

And Osborne has sold off more public assets in the last six months than any other chancellor ever has.

[Kizzy]

yep £57 million was the last figure I saw, it really is vomit inducing how much wealth has been siphoned up, ensuring the 'elite' retain the lions share of the money and power for generations to come.
In that respect he has been very successful, for the public? not so much.

[DemolitionRed]

Kizzy, this year's proposed sell-off total, currently £31.8 billion, is roughly just one fifth of the total amount raised by all privatisations from 1979 to 2014, a period of 35 years.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/bu...-10440918.html