Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Neil Clark: Pull up on the hard shoulder, David Cameron, and think again

This article, by CPO co-founder Neil Clark, appears in The Week.

THEY'VE flogged off the Tote, the state-owned bookmaker set up by Winston Churchill in 1928. They've sold the Channel Tunnel rail link to two Canadian pension funds. The NHS faces privatisation in all but name, some police services are to be carried out by private companies, and the Royal Mail, in state hands since its inception in 1516, is to be sold, with the taxpayer left paying for the company's pension fund liabilities.

And still the serial privatisers in the ConDem coalition aren't satisfied.

The most manically pro-privatisation government in British history - one which makes even the Thatcher governments from 1979-90 look positively social democratic - now wants to hand our motorways and 'A' roads over to private companies and foreign-owned investment funds.


The whole article can be read here.

1 comment:

David Lindsay said...

I was a proud expellee from the organisation then calling itself New Labour. I have no intention of rejoining, since I shall be voting to re-elect both of my sitting unitary county councilors, one Labour and one Independent, and since I have never voted Labour in a European Election and do not intend to start, due to the extreme federalist position, contrary to his own party’s policy, of the list-topping Labour candidate here in the North East.

But Ed Miliband’s Labour Party, as such, has pointedly declined to endorse the legal redefinition of marriage to include same-sex couples, a change which was specifically ruled out in 2000 by the then Home Secretary, Jack Straw. Expect a Labour free vote. That might deliver enough votes to defeat this proposal, if enough Coalition MPs broke a three-line whip and opposed a Government Bill which was not in either of their manifestos.

Ed Miliband’s Labour Party is also totally opposed to the cutting of incomes outside London and its environs, to the deregulation of Sunday trading, to the devastation of rural communities by letting foreign companies or even foreign states buy up our postal service or our roads, and to Royal Mail privatisation’s severing of the monarchy’s direct link to every address in this Kingdom.

And Ed Miliband’s Labour Party is the only Opposition party capable of winning the 2015 General Election. At that Election, he and it will deserve every support from everyone non-metropolitan, or who believes in traditional marriage, or who wants to keep Sunday special, or who supports family and local community businesses, or who cherishes rural communities and the countryside, or who defends national sovereignty over our economy and our infrastructure, or who values the Queen’s head on our stamps and her crown and initials on our post boxes.

In 1974, Enoch Powell told his supporters to vote Labour because of Europe. This is a 1974 moment.