The post you are reporting:
Colin: Best wishes for your retirement. Your job sounded very interesting and I hope that we continue to hear more about it. I am pleased to find somebody else who shares my sense of loss at having auctioned off the family silver.
Roger:
"All of those overseas conglomerates are strong organisations I believe and run pretty successfully?
So why is there such opposition to the selling off of the business of the Port of Dover, if done properly?"
The overseas conglomerates are indeed presumably run pretty successfully, although who can tell after all the spectacular disasters that the financial gurus have precipitated recently resulting in the bankruptcy of so many economies, including our own. If they wish to buy the Port of Dover then it is because they see it as a way of making more money which is the secret of being run pretty successfully. I would prefer to see us continue to operate and expand the port as we have done continuously over the years, to retain our own infrastructure and to keep the proceeds within our own economy.
"Southampton is the most popular Cruise Port in the Country."
Yes it is and always has been, as indeed it was the great transatlantic and South African liner port prior to the jet age. It is also a major container port together with serving other trades. It was all these things before being sold off, the success has nothing whatsover to do with latterly being sold to foreign owners and sending the profits abroad.
"To get the Town we want and deserve, we have to think big and be brave - or do we not want to be bold, brave and progressive and still keep what's important - our history and character?"
I will have to leave it to you to be bold, brave and progressive. My own view of the sale of this last remaining facet of our family silver is that it is rash, craven, foolish and regressive. An inexplicable last gasp of a discredited political creed that has seen a generation of lacklustre ingenuous political patsies sell off the nations assets built up over centuries of toil by a populace who have been betrayed.