Saturday 10 December 2016

Tory economic treason


Many Tory voters like to think of themselves as proud British patriots, and generally buy into the mainstream media propaganda that "lefties" are an unpatriotic bunch.

The problem with this mentality is that it is completely backwards. The Tory party have been pushing a deeply unpatriotic hard-right economic agenda for the last four decades, and the only people to have consistently complained about it are "lefties" like trade unionists, the democratic socialist faction of the Labour Party and the Green Party.

The hard-right Tory economic agenda is deeply unpatriotic because it relies on the idea of the UK state being so inherently inefficient that it must be prohibited from running as much vital infrastructure as possible (like the railways, the energy companies, any of our major industries, our airports, Royal Mail, our schools ...), but it has no problem with foreign states running the same infrastructure for us.

The Tories clearly believe that Britain is so pathetic that foreign governments can do a much better job of running our infrastructure and services than we can do ourselves.

The whole Tory privatisation agenda was always absolutely rotten to the core to begin with. Only a fool would agree with the idea that the British state is so inefficient that as much public property as possible needs to be sold off on the cheap, or simply given away for free, to wealthy private investors who then rent all that stuff back to the public at vastly inflated prices.

The reason the Tory privatisation agenda has become so treasonous is that after snatching ownership away from the British people, they now have no objection whatever to other states coming in and buying up the infrastructure, making it the public property of other countries.

Thanks to the Tories a load of stuff that used to be the public property of the British people is now the public property of other countries.

In the 1980s Margaret Thatcher sold off the UK gas distribution network on the cheap in order to fund tax cuts for the rich, but in December 2016 it was announced that the private owners of Britain's gas distribution network are selling it off to a consortium that includes the state investment funds of China and Qatar.

Imagine how anti-British the Tories must be to think that the British are so incapable of running our gas distribution network that we must be prohibited from doing so, yet the Chinese and Qataris are perfectly fit and able to run it for us (and extract a load of profits for themselves in the process).

The gas distribution network is far from the only example of stuff that used to be British public property ending up as the public property of other foreign states as a result of this treasonous hard-right Tory economic ideology.

  • Huge swathes of the privatised UK rail network are operated by the state rail companies of other countries. In fact the UK is the only country that is prohibited from bidding to run UK rail franchises.
  • The governments of France, Germany, Belgium and Hong Kong also have stakes in the UK rail network.
  • Yorkshire Water is 26% owned by the Singapore government.
  • The Chinese and Qatari governments just bought a stake in the UK gas distribution network.
  • The Tories sold off the UK nuclear power generation facilities in the 1990s. Now the whole lot is owned and operated by EdF, which is the state owned energy company of France.
To make matters even worse the Tories are now intent on bribing foreign states into building our new infrastructure projects for us. In 2016 Theresa May signed off on an extraordinary rip-off deal to bribe the French and Chinese states into building new nuclear power stations for the UK. This astoundingly poor deal means that the UK taxpayer will pay twice the market rate for electricity for 35 years, and then be left with the bill for cleaning up the nuclear waste too.

The Tory ideology of privatise the profits and nationalise the losses needs to be updated in light of the increasing ownership of British infrastructure by foreign states.

The Tory ideology is to allow foreign states to extract the profits while loading the losses onto the British taxpayer.

It's extraordinary that the Tory politicians and their supporters are so vehemently opposed to vital British infrastructure being run on behalf of, and for the benefit of the British people, but they have no objection whatever to British infrastructure being used as a cash cow by the governments of foreign states.

The sad thing is that so many Tory supporters are so myopic that they think that Theresa May spouting mind-numbingly meaningless platitudes like "red, white and blue Brexit" makes her a proud British patriot, but they're too damned ignorant to consider the Tory policy of stealing public infrastructure from the British people and then allowing it to end up in the hands of foreign states as the brazen economic treason that it is.


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