In a fire sale in a buyer’s market, the UK’s Labour Government is to dispose of a serious of national assets as quickly as possible. This is designed to pay back a little of our national debt and finance spending proposals in Labour’s coming general election campaign manifesto.

The assets to be sold off include:

• the Channel Tunnel – our sole ‘land’ link to the mainland of Europe
• the Dartford crossing (a bridge)
• the state-owned horse-racing betting organisation, the Tote
• the Student Loan Book – a sub-prime mortgage equivalent if ever there was one
• the national 33% stake in URENCO – the European Uranium Consortium

The Government is also to ‘encourage’ Local Authorities and other public sector authorities like NHS Trusts to sell property and other assets to help make up the shortfall in their spending plans and contribute to bridging the budget deficit.

In this recession, the state of the market – described as ‘distressed’, is such that the Government is also unlikely to raise the projected £16 billion from this assets sale.

This year’s budget deficit will be a minimum of £175 billion. It could go to £220 billion. £16 billion was an unimaginable amount of money this time last year. Today it’s small change. It will make little impact on the size of the debt we have to service.

It would be infinitely more sensible simply to cancel Trident – which is an out-of-date cold war defence system at best. This would not involve handing over control of even more major assets to private sector foreign interests. Most importantly, it would save 6 times what the asset sale, at best, will raise.

Just over 3 weeks ago Greenpeace, backed by senior politicians, warned that the cost of replacing the UK’s Trident nuclear weapons system will be over £95 billion – in contrast to the £20 billion figure earmarked by the government.

£95 billion takes a much closer look at this year’s £175 billion deficit. Even the Government’s £20 billion estimate is 25% more than the most optimistic projections of income from this sale of national assets.

And of course, in these days of high prices for gold, the UK does not have that resource to fall back upon to sell at this profitable time. Gordon Brown sold off 400 tonnes of bullion, half of the nation’s gold reserves, between 1999 and 2002 – at the bottom of the market.

Today’s announcement is not actually the start of the fire sale. Rothschilds were asked in the Spring this year by sub-Chancellor, Alastair Darling, to prepare the Royal Mint for sale. And the Ordnance Survey is next in line.

• We don’t own our own water. Everybody but us does.
• We don’t own our own power. Everybody but us does.
• We don’t own our Atomic Weapons Establishment. France and America do.
• We don’t own our major airports. Spain does.
• We don’t own our ports – and Scotland has no control whatsoever over the major port of Clasgow and Clyde. Clydeport Ltd is an unsupervised private company, given statutory authority and owned by secretive billionaire, John Whittaker, who lives at Billown Mansion in the low tax regime of the Isle of Man.
• We don’t own our own foreign policy. America does.
• With the massively expensive PPP and PFI schemes to which the Blair/Brown Governments have committed us, we don’t own many of our hospitals, schools and major public construction projects – and we will be paying well over the odds for them for years to come.
• Scotland doesn’t own its own whisky. Diageo owns 4o% of production and Pernod Ricard owns 20%.

We are already little else but tenants in our own country. Remember what happened to tenants in the Highland Clearances?

Planet Business really does rule and Gordon Brown is selling them what’s left.

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