Protecting national security after foreign investment . On the day UK Govt bribes American fertiliser owners of a UK plant with tax payers money. Thatcher did her best to sell off British Industry and so the Tories carry on. Not just Rover to BMW for £1. We used to make things, invent things. WE invented front wheel drive, the 5 speed gearbox, the mini. We let others steal the ideas. Problem is when the Government needs a control over something it has sold and becomes at the mercy of foreign investors, to secure jobs or services. In addition there is no national interest anymore, only vested interests. Unlike any other developed nation the UK has sold off considerable amounts of its major industries and assets to overseas owners. This has weakened democratic control of industry, inflated our exchange rate and seriously undermined our manufacturing base. The National Assets Sale: What did we sell? Foreign interests bought from us an incredible range of what had previously been owned in Britain. Most of our power generating companies, our airports and ports, our water companies, many of our rail franchises and our chemical, engineering and electronic companies, our merchant banks, an iconic chocolate company - Cadbury, our heavily subsidised wind farms, a vast amount of expensive housing and many, many other assets all disappeared into foreign ownership. No other country in the world allowed this sort of thing to happen. Why did it occur in Britain? There were three main overlapping reasons. The first was an institutional change. Until 1999, when it was abolished, the Monopolies and Mergers Commission was required to consider whether take-overs satisfied a general public interest test. The organisation which replaced it after 1999, the Competition Commission, had no such remit. It was only concerned with whether acquisitions would weaken competition. This left the UK with no process for reviewing whether the wider interests of the British economy were likely to be compromised by the purchase by foreign interests of UK companies and other assets. Second, this was the time when there was blind faith in the market. If there were buyers for British companies why not sell to them? Did it matter who owned UK companies provided they were well run? Third, there were vast sums of money to be made arranging the take-over deals. It seems that 3% was about the average fees and commissions charged on all the take-overs which took place. The City – for most of the 2000s at the zenith of its political influence - must have earned about £40bn from the sale of UK assets during the 2000s. Therefore research and development will go to the home base as will taxes. There will be less investment in UK. Profits will cross seas and oceans than ploughed back in UK. Even exchange rates suffer as the financial markets look at UK balance sheets and their assets. France Italy Germany all differ to the UK approach. Did it make any sense at all to run the economy like this? Surely it was a disastrous error to allow this free for all sale of UK assets to take place. We mortgaged our heritage, made the economy dramatically less competitive, hollowed out our manufacturing base and made it even more difficult to get the economy to perform satisfactorily in future. Some price to pay for belief that the market always knows best!
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