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Laissez-faire Britain loses another brick in the wall
Non! Neil Clark bemoans the imminent sale of International Power to a French state owned group
Just over 30 years ago, Britain's infrastructure, its public transport and its leading manufacturing industries were all in the hands of the British state. Who could have predicted that three decades later, much of our economy would be in the hands of the governments of other European countries?
Deutsche Bahn, owned by the German state, and Nederlandse Spoorwegen, owned by the Dutch government, operate many of our train and bus services.
EDF Energy, a subsidiary of the state-owned French energy company EDF, owns British Energy, the UK's largest electricity generator and operator of our nuclear power stations.
This week the French energy giant GDF-Suez, in which the French government owns a 35 per cent stake, is poised to buy International Power, one of Britain's biggest energy suppliers. The company was formed from a demerger of National Power, which in turn was formed after the privatisation of Britain's electricity-generating industry in 1990.
It is one of the great ironies of modern British political history that some of the biggest beneficiaries of the free-market, anti-statist policies carried out by successive British governments in the past 30 years have been the state-owned companies of other European countries.
We were told by the Thatcherites, and neo-liberal think tanks such as the Adam Smith Institute, which pushed aggressively for privatisation, that reducing state ownership would improve economic efficiency and be good for the country. But while Britain put up a 'For Sale' sign on our national assets, other European nations have played a far more intelligent game.
It's hard to imagine the French, wedded to a policy of Gaullist economic nationalism, allowing SNCF, their prestigious national railway, to suffer the fate of British Rail and allow foreign-owned companies to operate their train services.
It's inconceivable, too, to imagine Germany allowing an iconic company like Volkswagen to fall into foreign hands, as Britain did with its car industry.
The political elites in continental Europe never embraced free-market dogma as enthusiastically as their British counterparts. And neither did their electorates. In France, the pro-privatisation Thatcherite Alain Madelin, leader of the now-defunct Democratic Liberal party mustered less than four per cent of the vote in the 2002 presidential election.
In Germany, the Free Democratic party did return to government in last year's elections, but their calls for further privatisation have been scotched by their more moderate Christian Democrat and Christian Social Union coalition partners.
In Belgium, radical free-market reforms are held in suspicion by both main parties of the left and right. While in Austria, another European country which missed out on the delights of Thatcherism, the state still runs the trains and buses - and most Austrians seem perfectly happy with the arrangement.
British neo-liberals, rather than admit that their 30-year 'Everything is For Sale' policy towards the economy has been a disaster, prefer to badger their continental counterparts to 'liberalise' their economies and call on them to stop trying to protect their national flagships from foreign takeovers.
But wouldn't it be better if we simply copied the more nationally-minded - and more sensible - policies of France, Germany, Austria and Belgium?
Sadly, there's not much chance of that happening in the near future.
Britain's new coalition government out-Thatchers Thatcher in its desire to roll back the frontiers of the state and its commitment to the 'free market'.
"We are an open, global economy. We cannot start creating ownership barriers, trade barriers and protectionist barriers," declared David Cameron in relation to the takeover of historic British chocolate maker Cadbury's by the American Kraft earlier this year. A British Charles de Gaulle Dave most certainly is not.
Over the next few years we can expect to see more British companies bought up by state-owned companies from other countries. Our motorways operated by the German government? The Met Office run by Agencia Estatal de Meteorologia of Spain? The BBC sold to France Televisions?
That might seem a trifle far-fetched. But so too would the idea, 30 years ago, of our electricity industry - and our nuclear power stations - being owned by the French state.
Our closest neighbour may have given us the phrase 'laissez-faire'. But it's been the ideologically-blinkered Brits who have been silly enough to use it as an economic mantra. ·
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It seems that Britain truly is broken. We sold out to the Americans and we know our place - junior partners! Even when we stood alone with only the help of our Commonwealth colleagues (who are long since forgotten) we were under the thumb of our Atlantic 'cousins'. Now we are trampled over and trampled on as our all-powerful 'cousin' takes over all that's worth having.
"All the King's horses and all the King's men couldn't put Britain together again".
Nothing more, nothing less than the decline of the UK into a virtual nation - its economy run from overseas, its society bending to the demands of minority immigrants, its political system completely adrift from the people it calims to represent
"British neo-liberals, rather than admit that their 30-year 'Everything is For Sale' policy towards the economy has been a disaster, prefer to badger their continental counterparts to 'liberalise' their economies"
This seems to be based on the premise that the government needs to be in the business of owning an energy network and that a foreign company owning it is a disaster... the article doesn't actually explain the benefit of nationalisation, versus private ownership (foreign or otherwise). Bit of a Trojan horse of an argument: foreign ownership isn't really what has annoyed the writer... private ownership appears to be the problem..
The difference is much more complex than this somewhat simplistic but affectionate rant implies. British Rail was certainly not a model of successful innovation as Deutsche Bahn and the SNCF have been. And Swiss Railways, publicly owned, are the best recommendation in Europe - possibly in the world - of a socially responsible and highly efficient public transport system. But the issue is how do you get investment that is well made and really serves the public. Mrs Thatcher starved British Rail of investment for a very long time, and privatisation of the railways in Britain has not followed a sensible pattern. Yet things could be worse. We are still suffering from the "first on the job" problem, as a result of which our railway tracks are laid too close together to allow us to run comfortable modern trains (like DBahn's ICE trains), and our bridges are too low for us to use double-decker trains for commuter services like the rest of the world. We misread everything when Dr Beeching started shutting down the feeder branch lines, just as when we failed to keep any theatre companies going in the "provinces". After all in the rest of Europe the whole habituation of a public to theatre- and opera-going is dependent on the maintenance of locally funded resident ensembles of performers, something that simply does not exist at all in the UK. The cost of recreating or further developing any of these desirable elements of a civilised life (whether in public transport, or in culture, or in the power and water supply and sewage disposal businesses) will be immence, and on the whole our regime of low tax for the rich sinply militates against any such radical shift of direction being achieved on the basis of public investment - though Transport for London is doing not so badly considering our shockingly awful record of old nationalised industries in the past. We did mindlessly abandon the potteries, so that we can only manufacture sanitary ware and not much of that. We have little sense of why we should have a cultural future in porcelain and earthenware as well as a past. The story is lamentable. But we take shelter as Brits in the idea that really we are still great because the Americans are - in whom our rich have invested much of their wealth. In the US under licence they still make reproductions of some of the tableware we no longer make, or the 1940s perfumes even the French have not deigned to continue to produce. And Americans own a lot of what there is left to own in the UK. However, things would probably be getting even worse if we went in for a Little Britain policy and tried to exclude all the foreign owners, who at least may be interested in investing what is needed to modernise so much of our lamentable infra-structure and use some of our vestigial skills and enthusiasm and individualism. We were among the first levellers to behead a monarch. Our civil war was a long time ago. We started orientating ourselves towards the Europeans when we preferred having Hanoverian monarchs we could control to unstable Scots who were obsessed with religion. We made the right decision about that. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 is still glorious. And what is happening with the ownership of our industries and enterprises is in line with all of that. Surprisingly they (the outsiders from the "continong") seem to actually want to live here and own property here. There must be something we are doing right, if they really want to be so close and intimate with us!
Lions lead by donkeys, though the donkeys seem to be turning into chickens and feathering their own nests, and the lions are old and have no teeth.
The people should revolt, and overturn the fools that govern, but they all have too much debt to consider individual action, and successive administrations have done so much to kill community that no group revolt is likely.