General British politics discussion thread

Countil housing and British Rail are just two examples.

Not sure what she sold off? Everything that wasn't nailed down. BAe, Cable and Wireless, the car companies, BT, British Gas, BP, Rolls Royce Aero, National Grid, power generation, the water sector.

Many of these had underpriced IPOs or other very poor sales deals for the UK Government at that.

She asset stripped the nation for the benefit of the business sector, and laid the basis for the state the UK is in today.

is he Jewish?

When Railtrack was privatised, maintenance fell to such a level that fatal derailments or crashes (on a much less overloaded system) were frequent. 38 dead between Ladbroke Grove and Potters Bar for instance, which were undeniably caused by poor maintenance.

Underinvestment is still a huge issue, but the private sector weren't investing either. Signalling and electrification upgrades have not recovered from the Railtrack era.

And with a state that's extremely cash-starved, there isn't much there to invest to begin with.

Privatisation of BR was the direct cause of multiple crashes and fatalities on the railway. Railtrack got rid of a lot of the BR era engineers and decided that they know best and out-sourced the maintenance and renewals. BR in the late 1980s were getting the better and actually performed very well late 1980s and early 1989s just when the Tories decided to very quickly sell everything off.

My son works for JP Morgan and he thinks Dimon is a right wing whinger… I tend to agree with him (my son that is)

Even immigration was a distant fourth on 19%.

Retaining a strong shareholding in Renault works pretty well for France… Rolls Royce Aero is about the only obvious sell to me. UK aircraft industry has not done well under private ownership, and the shareholding in Airbus would have been incredibly performative to retain.

Telecoms have faltered badly too - very high prices, low broadband speeds, poor broadband coverage and poor mobile signal suggest that flogging off both your telecoms companies to the highest bidder may not have worked well.

Forgot to add BAA to the craven privatisations list. UK airport sector is a disgrace, with obscene charges, terrible facilities or more often both being the norm.

Still plenty of local government owned airports admittedly, but if they're busy they are milked to make up for council income losses elsewhere - over a quarter of a billion out of MAG (Manchester, Stansted, Bournemoth) in the last two years alone, 70% to Manchester-area council shareholders; Luton was averaging over 25m out a year pre-pandemic. Manchester is an utter disgrace of an airport you would be embarrassed to have in a tinpot nation.

I am not aware of the British state holding any % of BP?

Thatcher sold too much, too cheap. That cannot possibly be denied; and also makes it impossible for a "new Thatcher" - as another user was hoping for - to be able to do anything like Thatcher did. There's nothing left to sell to fund that type of politics.

That the country is suffering from that asset stripping ever since is also easily shown.