A snip at the price, I think you will agree, Bob. I can see that I am going to have to print off a lot more Dovorian bonds.
Vic: I agree that the port is worth a lot more than £500m but there is good reason to believe that it will be sold off for a fraction of what it has cost the nation to build up over the centuries, as with the rest of the family silver that has been given away. The figure mentioned by the Conservatives at the last election but one, when they first mooted the idea of privatisation, was a mere £100m which was only slightly more than the cost of the two new berths under construction at the time.
I think we can also draw comfort from the derisory £66m that the exchequer received for the sale of all the ports and ships belonging to Sealink when British Rail was privatised*. These were sold to Sea Containers, registered in Bermuda and completely owned by American shareholders, who later disposed of them at enormous profit. The national assets which my parents generation struggled to pay for in the postwar years following nationalisation of the railways in 1948 were cheerfully handed on a plate to wealthy American investors.
With this in mind, can we have any doubt that a caring, compassionate government will be any less munificent in its dealings with poor little Dover, squatting under the shadow of a monster derelict skyscraper on the edge of an undulating tarmac wasteland slapped down over the ruins left by cross-channel guns half way through the last century and lined with boarded up pubs and shops, a long-disused concrete multi-storey carpark and an empty furniture warehouse?
* "Sealink was sold for £66 million on 27th July 1984 to British Ferries, a subsidiary of Sea Containers Ltd, an international seafreight company whose owner and President, James Sherwood, had recently purchased five of the former BT hotels. This sale took place at a time when one large cross-channel ferry was valued at approximately £20 million. It was a bargain for Sea Containers who took over 37 ships of various size, 10 harbours and 9,390 staff of whom 2,529 were salaried.............As the economy worsened, Sea Containers found itself under financial pressure, and a hostile bid from the Swedish company Stena line led to the prospect of lengthy and expensive legal proceedings. In order to thwart the Stena Line and resolve its financial problems, Sea Containers sold some of its assets, and five years after buying the whole of Sealink for £66 million, Sea Containers proposed selling its Isle of Wight Services to Radiant Shipping for £107.5 million. This failed to materialise as in January 1990, Stena Line offered Sherwood £259 million for Sealink - a price he could hardly refuse. It was an amazing deal, from which James Sherwood emerged the clear winner. Not only did he make a huge profit, he retained the Isle of Wight Services, the ports of Heysham, Newhaven, Folkestone, the Lake Windermere Services, and development land at Harwich. The losers were the British people who had seen their assets sold cheaply in 1984."
http://www.tssa.org.uk/about/single-or-return/chapter29.htm