United Kingdom
Related: About this forumDavid Cameron unveils plan to sell off the roads
Just 48 hours before the budget, the prime minister will give a speech calling for radical action to improve Britain's infrastructure, which is falling behind those of key competitors in Europe.
In his most eye-catching proposal, Cameron will announce that the Treasury and Department for Transport are to carry out a feasibility study looking at using private-sector funds to improve and maintain trunk roads and motorways.
The prime minister's plan, modelled on the funding of the mains water and sewage network, would see sovereign wealth funds and pension funds given the right to lease roads over a long period. They would be set a series of targets to, for example, reduce congestion and carry out improvements. George Osborne recently travelled to China to persuade the world's largest fiscal-surplus country to invest in Britain's infrastructure.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/mar/19/david-cameron-sell-off-roads?newsfeed=true
Going Out Of Business! Everything Must Go!
TheMastersNemesis
(10,602 posts)The RW conspiracy is international. The Kochs have their little grimy hands in there somewhere. And what do you all think the GOP is up to. They are ready to have fire sale if they win. Out goes our water systems, our farms, our sewer systems, our power systems, even our water rights, our roads, our buildings, our national parks, our state parks, our cities, our natural resources, etc
Better get ready to speak Chinese because you local police and firefighters will be speaking a new language. Mitt the outsourcer has a lot of deals in the waiting.
asjr
(10,479 posts)AdHocSolver
(2,561 posts)ladjf
(17,320 posts)LeftishBrit
(41,205 posts)Now we can all be literally owned by China plus a few very rich cronies of the PM. O wot joy.
One of the areas where Britain has tended to do better than many other countries is road safety, so we can look forward to that ending.
truebrit71
(20,805 posts)..
The thing is, I EXPECT this sort of thing from this toffee-nosed git....Nick Clegg's behaviour otoh is despicable...I firmly believe he has put the Lib/Dems back 30 years by his (in)actions since becoming Camerwrong's b*tch...
Funny how we thought that the newly oil-rich Arabs would buy all of the UK back in the 1970's (Genesis - Selling England by the Pound)...when in reality it was Maggie and Just Call Me Dave doing all of the selling...
Prophet 451
(9,796 posts)but this shitehawk is even worse.
Prophet 451
(9,796 posts)(note: I'm a Satanist, we have no problem praying for someone's death)
This little bastard has, in his time in office, been the most radical PM we've had in over a century. It's like Thatcherism on steroids: Sell everything off, attack the most vulnerable and look after teh rich.
muriel_volestrangler
(101,316 posts)And that investment does come, and things get shinier. Surely if the private sector werent replacing our old sewers, and wont replace our old motorways and power stations, wed need to pay higher taxes instead? The truth is that we already do pay higher taxes. They just arent called taxes. Our water supply system is being upgraded because of a huge water tax increase. But it isnt called that. Its called the water bill. As Chris Giles explained yesterday in the FT, water bills have gone up by nearly twice as much as inflation since privatisation. We pay a rail tax: its called fare increases. We pay an energy tax in the form of higher electricity bills, and so on.
By packaging British citizens up and selling them, sector by sector, to investors, the government makes it possible to keep traditional taxes low or even cut them. By moving from a system where public services are supported by general taxation to a system where they are supported exclusively by the fees people pay to use them, they move from a system where the rich are obliged to help the poor to a system where the less well-off enable services, like a road network, that the rich get for what is, to them, a trifling sum.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2012/03/20/james-meek/human-revenue-stream/
fedsron2us
(2,863 posts)The biggest lie in British politics is the idea that the Conservatives are the party of Enterprise. The reality is that they have less grasp of the productive and wealth enhancing possibilities of capitalism than Marxist idealogues. Instead the Tories are devoted to parcelling up resources within the economy, selling them to their chums who then extract rents from the rest of the populace for their use
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rentier_capitalism
David Cameron's proposals on roads is just another example of this dismal philosophy in practise. It is just as much a tax on production as any set of state levies imposed by socialists and far less equitable.
As the wiki article so aptly notes this is a 'decadent', 'parasitic' and rotten form of capitalism with no future.
T_i_B
(14,738 posts)....are politicians and "think tank" wonks with no experience of business in the real world. People who only know about business from what they have read in a book. This leads to bad policies such as PFI that would never be acceptable in the private sector as a way of dealing with suppliers.