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QUOTE (from BarryW): I understand how upsetting it must be for loyal, longstanding Old Labour stalwarts to see Gordon Brown privatising our port. While I approve I do understand how you must feel it's a betrayal and a let down. UNQUOTE
Don't want to worry you, Barry, but I am anything but a loyal, longstanding Old Labour stalwart. I was a loyal, longstanding Conservative stalwart during the days of Old Labour. Nowadays I vote as my inclination takes me.
I suspect that your tunnel vision view of the world where you wilfully refuse to see anything outside the orthodox Conservative party line and cheerfully ignore all empirical evidence that categorically demonstrates endless instances where it is clearly completely the wrong path to follow gives rise to your supposition that anybody who challenges any facet of Conservative thinking whatsover must surely be an unspeakable, loathsome, card holding, ferret owning, cloth capped, Trotskyite, commie red-under-the-bed.
Your conjecture that I must feel a sense of betrayal and let down is correct but not quite in the way which you suppose. I regard New Labour as a clone of the Conservatives and therefore my sense of betrayal is directed primarily at the Conservatives and only by association at their clone.
I consider it to be the Conservatives who have sold my country from under my feet. They have hollowed it out from within and left a house of cards which collapsed at the first breath of wind. All of the infrastructure has been sold abroad, indigenous manufacturing industry abandoned, and the proceeds invested in stocks and shares in the City. The financial fat cats have then blown the lot on high roller speculation to achieve mega bonuses. I regard this as the penalty for hewing mindlessly to a single blinkered private-enterprise-fits-all dictum that fails to recognise the benefits of having other arrows in ones quiver.
Anyway, enough of that. I have a question which you may be able to answer as our resident money man. The Port of Dover has been a trust port for four hundred years. It has been owned by the nation and all of the profits have been reinvested in the port. Competent management in the past has given us a port which has seen off every challenge and flourished to become the major ferry terminal in Western Europe and the second largest cruise port in the UK, together with a useful cargo handling capacity and yacht marina. Every demand has been met with continuous expansion and modernisation of the ports facilities. It is clearly a tried and tested system which works and delivers.
Bob Goldfield proposes to sell the port off to foreign investors, he has left no doubt about that with his oblique references to "spreading the net as far as possible" and "finance is global." These investors will want to see a return on their money. If investment in the port is to continue at present levels, then all the current profits will still need to be reinvested in the port and will not be available to pay shareholders. From where exactly are they going to get all the additional money to give a return to the shareholders for the £500 million which they will have paid to purchase the port, and additionally the money which they are confidently expected to shower on the local community?