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Monday, January 13, 2014

Selling off Britain



This new column of mine appears in the Morning Star.

Thatcher may be gone, but the serial privatisers are still in full flow - so it's up to us to stop them, writes NEIL CLARK

Twenty-thirteen was the year which saw the death of Margaret Thatcher, the politician who first unleashed privatisation on Britain on coming to power in 1979.

It was also the year when Thatcher's disciples in the Westminster coalition sold off national assets and services that even the Iron Lady ruled out privatising - showing just how far down the neoliberal road we have travelled.

You can read the whole piece here.

4 comments:

DBC Reed said...

It strikes me that the mother of all privatisations was the privatisation of the national housing supply by that creepy dullard Thatcher herself.The private sector has not only induced complete market failure in the housing "market",this has blown back into the entire economy sucking demand out of people's disposable incomes by leaving them with nothing to spend in the shops after paying for inflated rents and mortgages.
Henry George et al were saying this could happen over a century ago and simple taxation measures could have avoided it.Now the only recourse is massive house building by the public sector.

DBC Reed said...

You should really include the most disastrous Thatcher privatisation ,the first and mother of all privatisations: housing.Since the right to buy council houses and other vandalism to the post-war consensus arrangements, housing has gone very largely into the hands of the private sector which has produced complete market failure and galloping house price inflation.Not only that ,this ur-privatisation has condemned the younger generation to mortgage slavery with diminishing ready money to spend in the shops .The predicted by Henry George disaster.

Neil Clark said...

Hi- I couldn't agree more with what you say. Privatisation of council housing & the other neoliberal'reforms' to the housing sector have had disastrous social and economic consequences.

brian said...

very amusing!
http://prosign.tumblr.com/post/33766157596/someone-has-made-fake-london-underground-signs-and