Deborah Orr writes:
The government is thrilled that it has found a
buyer for the Treasury’s 40% stake in Eurostar.
And no wonder. An
Anglo-Canadian consortium has offered to pay £757m. In the autumn of 2013, when
the coalition first announced its plan to sell, it expected to raise £300m.
Which looks like prima facie evidence that the government doesn’t have much
idea about how valuable national assets are.
It’s all, says the chancellor,
George Osborne, “part of our long-term plan to secure Britain’s future.” To an
idiot such as myself, it looks like part of a long-term plan to secure the
future of Patina Rail LLP.
I thought the long-term economic
plan was to narrow the deficit. I do see how a large injection of cash can do
this in the short term – by paying off some debt.
But in the long term, selling
off state-owned, profit-making assets can only ever make the government all the
more dependent on tax revenues.
As ever, profit gets privatised and risk or
liability remains the business of the state.
If Patina Rail LLP makes a mess of
running the service, it’s not hard to see who’ll be expected to pick up the
pieces.
Osborne has said that this money will in part be invested
in infrastructure. Great.
When that money has been spent on some
infrastructure, when the risk is over and the profits are starting to flow,
that in turn can be sold to the private sector, who will run it as they please,
safe in the knowledge than anything too big for the private sector to invest in
is also too big to fail.
Neoliberal dogma says that the
private sector manages things more efficiently – often by using its magic
powers of ruthlessness and cynicism.
Yet a large proportion of the national
debt that is waved before the electorate like a shotgun has been amassed
precisely because the private sector refuses to make long-term and strategic
investments.
Why create a new rail service, when you can sit back and wait for
the state to establish one, then buy it once it’s making a profit?
I simply cannot imagine.
In Britain, we are all now
hostages to private fortune. Even infrastructure paid for from
the public purse will only get the nod if it benefits the wealthy.
The rest of
the UK doesn’t have much sympathy for London. But what’s happening in London is
staggering. It is becoming a place that people visit to make money or spend it,
not a place where people actually live.
The whole of the UK’s capital is being
privatised, and there’s no doubt plenty of money to be made in the years to
come by getting people in and out of it on fast trains.
It’s a shame that
Canadian business people understand this better than British politicians do.
No comments:
Post a Comment