Selling Off Britain

Did you know the silverware in Downing Street is worth millions? Or that Gibraltar could raise eighteen billion pounds? The National Asset Register says we have around £300bn worth of things we could sell.

But we don’t need to stop at property and baubles. If we sold off our military assets, and made strategic defence alliances with our Nato partners the way Iceland has, we could raise an absolute fortune. Or we could sell off the motorways to private companies and pay tolls to use them. Unfortunately it doesn’t mean we can just wipe out the deficit in one go and cancel the cuts. The deficit is of course the difference between what we raise in tax and what we spend in any one year.

Read more: could selling off Britain’s assets cut the debt?

The national debt is what the nation has borrowed over the years, and asset sales generally have to go towards paying the national debt. But of course if we can hammer the debt we can reduce our interest payments, cut the deficit and have more money to spend (a bit like cutting your mortgage payments to reduce your overdraft).

Is it worth it? Or are some things, as we saw with the attempt to sell England’s forests, just too precious for short term fundraising? Would we be selling ourselves short? Would we fundamentally change the state we live in, and would that be good or bad?

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These are the dilemmas I’ll be examining with experts and a studio audience live on Channel 4’s Dispatches. You can also play an interactive game #sellornot