PETER HITCHENS: Privatisation! Free trade! Shares for all! The great con that ruined Britain
I
am so sorry now that I fell for the great Thatcher-Reagan promise. I
can’t deny that I did. I believed all that stuff about privatisation and
free trade and the unrestrained market. I think I may even have been
taken in by the prophecies of a great share-owning democracy.
I
thought – this now seems especially funny – that private British
Telecom would be automatically better than crabby old Post Office
Telephones.
I
think anyone who has ever tried to contact BT when things go wrong
would now happily go back to the days of nationalisation. Soviet-style
slowness was bad, but surely better than total indifference.
I am so sorry now that I fell for the great Thatcher-Reagan promise. I can’t deny that I did, writes PETER HITCHENS
And
it’s all very well being able to buy cheap goods from all over the
world, as we fling our borders wide and abandon the protection of our
own industries that everyone says is so wicked and will make us poor and
backward.
How
I miss the old names of trusted brands, and the knowledge that these
things had been made for generations by my fellow countrymen.
But
the new broom swept, and it swept pretty clean. In towns I know well,
car assembly lines, railway workshops, glassworks engineering plants,
chocolate factories vanished or shrank to nothing.
A
journey across the heart of England, once an exhilarating vista of
muscular manufacturing, especially glorious by night, turned into
archaeology. Now, if it looked like a factory, it was really a ruin.
Someone
usually pops up at this stage and says that we still manufacture a lot.
If you say so, but then why are the drug-dealers so busy in our new
factory-free industrial areas, and why can I never buy anything that was
made here, except from absurdly expensive luxury shops?
Why
are our warships made of foreign steel? Why are the few factories that
do exist almost always foreign-owned, their fate decided far away by
people who don’t much care about this country?
And
why is our current-account deficit with the rest of the world the worst
it’s ever been in peacetime, and nearly as bad as it was during the
Great War that first bankrupted this country a century ago?
If
it’s all been so beneficial, why do so many of the containers that
arrive in British ports, full of expensive imports, leave this country
empty?
Sure, some things have got cheaper, and there are a lot more little treats and luxuries available.
The
coffee and the restaurants are better – but the essentials of life are
harder to find than ever: a good life and an honest place; a solid,
modest home big enough to house a small family in a peaceful, orderly
landscape; good local schools open to all who need them; reasonably paid
secure work for this generation and the next; competent government and
wise laws.
These have become luxuries, unattainable for millions who once took them for granted.
And
now the remains of our steel industry are vanishing, not because
nothing can be done (any determined government could save it if it
really wanted to) but because we’re all still worshipping that
free-market dogma that captivated us 30 years ago.
I
never thought I’d yearn for the National Coal Board or British Steel
or, good heavens, British Leyland. But I do begin to feel I was fooled
into thinking that what was coming next would be any better. At this
rate it may soon be much, much worse.
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