"Robin9" wrote in message


Which political axe do you suspect me of grinding? I'm not aware of
having one. I support no political party and have no ideolological
attitude to public ownership of industries and services. I want
whatever works best for the country as a whole.

You accuse the John Major Tories of corruption, when I think they were
merely ideological and incompetent.


Your interpretation of how the Tories privatised the railways ignores
the fact that there had already been a consistent pattern of
nationalised assets being under valued. I imagine many Tories would
laugh long and hard at the idea that they ever took John Prescott
seriously.

I didn't say the Tories took Prescott seriously; few politicians did. I
said that potential buyers of the railway assets were warned off from
buying them, meaning that the buyers were MBOs who could only raise much
smaller sums. When it became obvious that the nationalisation threat was
hollow, they sold the firms on at realistic values, meaning they made
big profits.


There are three serious flaws in your assertion that it doesn't really
matter if some pension funds made a quick profit.

As I keep saying, it wasn't the pension funds who made the quick profit
from privatised utilities, but the small share buyers who sold them on
to pension funds. This didn't apply with rail privatisation, as the
companies were not sold off as PLCs, apart from Railtrack.

First, not everyone
has a private pension and if their nationalised assets are sold off
cheaply they may be called upon to pay more in taxation than might
otherwise have been the case.

True, I'm certainly not in favour of selling off nationalised assets at
very low prices. John Major's government was idiotic to do so, and we're
still paying the price.

Second, pension funds are not the only
kind of financial institution and third, many people have since
railway privatisation discovered that their pension fund has woefully
underperformed.

As I said, it wasn't the pension funds who initially invested in the
railway assets, so their performance has nothing to do with rail
privatisation. Gordon Brown can take the credit for damaging Britain's
private pension industry.