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
There are 19 comments on this post
Interesting dilemmas. As always I work from the particular to the general for what one could/ would do grows proportionally in degrees of an original ‘move’ . We can look at the possibilites which are open to us and then look at ideas which others are proposing.
27 yrs ago I suffered at the hands of fraudsters, was thrown out of my house from a married status to a single parent status. I also incurred debts that were created by this set of people and paid them off. Although I have done everything in my life to do the right thing , trying to correct a wrong of others by ensuring I kept my head above trouble and out of debt I sold off jewelry worked 100 hrs a week, took degrees, brought kids up, the criminals kept laughing and taking more and continued in the abuse and kept their dirty boots on top of me to keep me down. That way I could not get justice, if I could not pay for it
This could happen if we sell more off. The banks and the takers think that the crass masses are just there to keep paying for their lifestyles whilst the victims are booted down.
Some cruel choices in your game there Krishnan!
In reality we shouldn’t need to sell off any of these things – although some, like the excessive number of state owned residences and gov wine cellars probably should be. It’s just a question of priorities. If I was spending £100 a month more than my income, I would look at saving in non-essential areas such as giving up gym membership and go out for a run instead or getting a takeaway on a weekend instead of going out for a meal. I wouldn’t stop buying essentials like food or medication. Nor would I stop buying books for my kids to read or items they need for school as their education is an investment in the future.
The govt should stop pandering to the corporate and political cliques and tell the EU it is a club we cannot afford at the moment and drastically reduce our contribution there. We only need a basic trading agreement, not to be paying for layers and layers of additional government that we dont want anyway and which does little to serve the people of the UK. There are plenty of other areas that could be cut back on too, such as ‘aid’ to wealthy countries and for starters closing tax loopholes.
Sadly, this govt seems unable to distinguish what is an investment in the future of the country from short term bean counting. Maybe because few of them have ever had to budget or balance the books having come from backgrounds where there is always more than enough and not had the experience of a job in the real world where you have to run your department to do the job required but also within a budget. So now in govt they see the need to work to a budget but have no idea how to effectively run the country as required – i.e. for the benefit of the majority of people – within that budget. A good deal more down-to-earth commonsense is needed than this lot put together can muster.
The basic problem is that the government has a greatly reduced income due to the fact that many commercial organisations have moved their operations overseas. Consequently, the government has to go to the ‘pawnbrokers’ and obtain money for state assets. The Tories are more interested in political power than long-term economic prosperity. The only reason the Lib Dems are supporting the Tories is because of the promise of electoral reform. It will be very interesting to see what happens after the Referendum in May.
Flog off some of those grace and favour homes for politicians – I’ve been advocating this ever since John Prescott got a luxury flat in Admiralty Arch.
Krishnan,
Instead of selling off the family silver to pay the burglars, why not lock up the criminals and take control of our own home again?
The whole “public debt” claim is a con that Josef Goebbels would have been proud of. It’s the same old rip off by the same old fraudsters and war mongers.
It would be comical if it wasn’t so obviously tragic. The logical conclusion is increasing poverty and misery that no true democracy would tolerate.
Do we REALLY have to go through all this yet again?
Selling off the nations assets makes no sense to me. It never has and probably never will.
We only need to reduce the national debt and the deficit by good housekeeping and by tightening our belt, not by taking everything we’ve got to the Pawnbrokers or Cash Converters.
Its unfortunate that the relentless chase for votes means that good housekeeping tends to go out of the window. It has historically been far too easy to spend money to win votes and let somebody else worry about the consequences of that spending decision a few years down the line…
Labour of course are the biggest offenders when it comes to over-spending and making big promises to win votes.
Tories just seem idealogically motivated to sell everything off, so that they and their chums can make lots of money out of that policy…
Anywhere else in the world, it would be seen as corrupt…!
Ray, the interesting thing about the tories is that they wouldn’t dream of selling off things like grace and favour houses, or even some of the No10 baubles, but they have no compunction about selling the NHS to the highest bidder
I think most people see it as corrupt here too. It’s just our arrogant political clique that pretend its not and carry on regardless.
Krishgm ↲i actually think selling off the cream of what is left of UK plc. Is like saying ‘we wont be in government long’ and thus we can do this and the true damage will not be felt during our time in government. And probably long after relinquishing an executive director role in said organisation. the tories think oliver twist deserved all he got and fagin should have recieved a knighthood!
Sell off Westminster to accommodate immigrants to provide accommodation suitable to their accustomed
standard of living.
This is another example of the usual Tory ploy of Theft and Reset of everything that is publicly owned.
It was all Mrs Thatcher achieved. Steal everything in the public domain that is not tied down and reset it to your chums.
Ordinary people pay the price. it is not surprising that ordinary folk own a far lower proportion of National Wealth than they did in 1979.
Coal industry, steel industry, water industry, oil industry, gas industry, rail industry. The list is almost endless.
And the result is that prices have risen steadily and many of them are now not even British any more.
Theft and Reset in any other area of life is illegal. Why not for Governments also
When will the ordinary folk ever learn.
What we should be doing to asset-stripping the banks – just like they do!
The Govt owns large parts of banks. What they should be doing to cashing-in on that and maximising the return year-on-year; not just a one-off levy or tiny bank bonus taxes.
I tried to buy the Goverment wine cellar and could’nt find it. I would buy it for £0.99.
There are thousands of empty MOD houses around great britain and Northern Ireland. We should either selling them off or give them to the homeless.
One Solution for First Time Buyers would be:
State Owned Lloyds Banking Group have been left holding vast tracts of residential land banks.
What is to stop the Government seize-ing these vast tracts of residential land from Lloyds?
1.] Setting up a Development Trust for First Time Buyer’s.
2.] One FTB is entitled to buy just one plot of land, for a vastly reduced rate, [60% off current land values.]
[With the caveat that each FTB will have to borrow from Lloyds, to build a house on their plot.]
[They could even include a clause which states that FTB'er's cannot sell the land/house for ten years
And then only back to the Development Trust for a fair market value.
And that the Development Trust must retain the land, to sell onto another FTB.
That way the land always remain's as 'affordable']
———————————————–
**Surely this would be a much Fairer democratic balance, and more equal spread of deficit reduction, than stealing FTB’ers money to bail out Lloyds, to pay to keep ‘everyone else’s’ property massively overinflated, ensuring FTB’ers can never afford their own property, and remain in ‘debt slavery?’
Especially considering it was systemic fraud which fuelled high house prices for over ten years.
The 2 Million ‘priced out’ voters would love the government.
The Building industry would be kickstarted.
The coalition would have put the people’s interest’s above the banksters and won the moral high ground.
Whats stopping them from doing this? Its not really any more complicated than the [Rip off] shared ownership schemes the government have been unsuccesfully peddling for years.
[Any agreement would also have to entail relaxed planning, for those who wanted to build Eco/Straw bale/Cob style houses. Which have been built in the UK for centuries. And are cheaper to construct]
Krishnan
It is so frustrating that so many people want to turn this into party politics.
All the poitical parties agreed we need to cut the deficit. But that is just reducing the ammount of NEW borrowing every year. The media don’t explain this properly – one of the participants in your programme telked of paying back the deficit. No one corrected them.
Even when (if) the defecit is reduced to zero we will owe over one trillion pounds! And I’m not sure this includes unfunded public sector pension liabilities and other “off balance sheet” debts.
Please, please, please explain this properly so we can have a sensible debate!
The problem is that the government cannot spend without going into debt, the phrase ‘tax and spend’ is a fallacy, the truth is that its ‘spend then tax’ – the government spends using the Bank Of England by crediting an account without debiting another account, it then has to fund this credit as well as interest payments with treasury bonds (gilts) which are paid for with tax money. If you then consider this alongside the how banks operate today – they effectively lobbied for the permission to create money out of nothing where previously a fractional reserve system was used to control them – we have a system that only serves banks. Our efforts at work to pay bank interest, our mortgages to pay bank interest and our tax to pay bank interest!
“Of all the ways of organising banking, the worst is the one we have today”
- Mervyn King
Should we sell Birmingham?
Yes, of course we should but only if the buyer collects!
Why don’t we sell Bob Diamond and his mates? They are obviously extremely valuable people – the odd economic crash apart – and as the government is unwilling to do anything about their obscene salaries (while limiting nurses, police etc) perhaps we should cash in on them now.