Thursday 28 January 2010

Going, Going, Gone

No surprise here:

The British government is seeking to raise more cash by selling its 71.5 billion-pound ($116 billion) stake in three crippled banks than Margaret Thatcher generated by disposing of state-owned businesses during her entire 11 years in office.

From 1979 to 1990, then-Prime Minister Thatcher’s three administrations privatized more than 20 companies, including British Gas and British Airways. The total raised would now be worth about 68.5 billion pounds, adjusted for inflation, according to accounting firm Ernst & Young.


Privatisation was never about economics. To achieve her social aims, she happily flogged things off at absurdly reduced prices, losing this country eye-watering sums of money. So out went expressions and guarantees of national sovereignty; we must be the only country on earth that permits foreign states, as such, to own our nuclear power stations and our electricity supplies. Out went safeguards of the Union, often with the word “British” in their names. Out went providers of the secure, high-wage, high-skilled, high-status employment that underwrites paternal authority in the family and in the wider community.

And that is before we even begin to consider the sale of council housing, which even her most stalwart defenders are usually too embarrassed to mention. The State simply gifted considerable capital assets to people so that they entered the housing market ahead of private tenants who had saved for their deposits. And it created for itself the whole Housing Benefit racket, which even if it were fraud-free (and it is anything but) would still be colossally more expensive than just maintaining a stock of council housing and renting it out.

Still, Britain now has a living former Prime Minister who cannot visit at least 50 countries for fear of arrest, and whom a Radio Four presenter can call a war criminal on air without the BBC’s receiving a single complaint. For all her faults, that living former Prime Minister is not Margaret Thatcher.

4 comments:

  1. Mr. Lindsay said:

    "Privatisation was never about economics."

    I agree. In addition to the damaging impact privatization has had on unions, families, and national sovereignty, I believe privatization also created a culture of corruption and amorality (which is probably worse than plain old immorality) in the countries unlucky enough to have suffered neoliberal revolutions.

    Privatization is, at the very least, partially about crony capitalism. What else could explain the fact that so many state assets have been sold off at absurdly reduced prices? The sad fact is that, despite arguments to the contrary, neoliberalism is a very corrupt system. Public wealth (i.e. OUR wealth) is basically transferred to public companies, often on the basis of insider wheeling and dealing. Worse yet, when foreign firms purchase public assets at fire sale prices the result is a loss of national wealth.

    This really illustrates the "revolving door" problem, where public officials help push through sweetheart deals for private contractors or promote lax regulation in the hope of obtaining a plum job in the private sector.

    Neoliberal public sector policies like short-term contracting and salary freezes or cutbacks help make the "revolving door" problem worse by making public sector employment unattractive, which prompts civil servants to try to curry favor with the private sector in the hope of gaining more lucrative private sector employment in the future (not to mention also encouraging more obvious forms of corruption such as outright bribery, but that is a topic for another day).

    What is so maddening about all of this is how so many (often otherwise well-meaning) Christian voices argue that the Reagan and Thatcher Revolutions were triumphs for "Christian values."

    ReplyDelete
  2. I know I always feel silly not being as erudite as you and having to tease slightly more information out of you than you let on, or asking the most obvious questions, but, I suppose that's what for the comment box is for.

    Which presenter said that of our former PM?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Well said.

    I'm afraid I haven't got time to think of a more intelligent comment but work beckons...

    ReplyDelete
  4. Kyle, Sandi Toksvig on The News Quiz. No one at all complained, at which even the BBC itself was taken aback.

    ReplyDelete