I remember back in the day being advised to apply for a few hundred pounds of British Gas shares and then British Telecomm shares. I think it was Sid who provided the initial advice, I duly obtained them and sold them just as fast - making a small profit. Then came other privatisations - water, trains, etc. I felt that there was a marked difference between the first two and the rest. These others seemed like part of the national infrastructure rather than just one operator amongst many. It also seemed that the carving up of old monopolies would be difficult to achieve without some problems. Lastly, I heard the politicians proclaim that private ownership would unleash a wave of investment and it would be all be so much better - and I knew for sure then that this was profiteering, lies and doomed. Well some made a lot of money from it. Now it all looks like a drain for everyone and gorging at the profits for a few.
We were sucked in by British Energy and the huge nuclear selloff. We liked the prospectus and the future looked bright for our considerable investment. Then out of the blue came an offer to buy all that we owned. We refused and before anything could be done, our shares were compulsorily purchased by the government and then passed over to the French EDF (spit) without any appeal route, the bastards!!
Privatisation was supposed to unleash cheaper prices as there was more competition, instead we saw price fixing throughout…
Privatisation is certainly on the nose here right now, a bit too late perhaps?
You mean you never saw Sid as the thin end of the wedge?
Anyway, it wasn’t Sid’s fault, he was (if anyone managed to tell him) just another potential small scale profiteer.
Hi
Yes, it has been a disaster imposed on us by both sets of Politicians
, not on the basis of efficiency, just because of political dogma.
Our infrastructure is largely owned by foreign governments either directly or through State Pension Schemes and Investment Schemes and instead of using the profits generated here in the UK in investment here they are used for the benefit of those other Countries.
The damage does not stop there, it is compounded by them moving the manufacturing and maintenance side of things from the UK to their own countries.
Blame the folks who bought the shares, flogged um and went to Benidorm for a couple of weeks on the proceeds.
Two fair points.
Was Sid the thin end of the wedge? Yes (coz obviously that success directly led to the next one and the next one) and no. I say no because BG and BT were one player amongst many in their field = BG already and BT to be very, very soon. This meant state ownership was increasingly untenable - a state owned company directly competing with many private companies. Either with an unfair advantage of state support or with the terrible disadvantage of layers of civil servants trying to flex a company in a fast moving technological environment. Neither was sustainable. The others - water, electricity, rail were not in the same position.
I do not blame myself and others for trying to gain a little from a time when everyone else seemed to be on the make (or take?). These small time buyers were never the main concept - they were the sop to make the sell off plan acceptable. It was always designed for the major corporate investors and they were the ones buying up the small time investors shares. The sell off and the profit for the major investors and then subsequently the fat directors would have happened without those who gained enough for a holiday. So why blame them?
Its refreshing Lincs, to hear someone admit to their part in the downfall of something, most would claim until blue in the face that their very limited action had no impact in the greater scheme of things, this denial is not only limited to the privatization scenario.
Thanks for clarifying exactly my point and doing so very eloquently. Let me help you get beyond your witty retort.
I bought perhaps £200 of British Gas shares, and if I recall correctly sold them for a profit of £80. I was clearly a major and influential player. The alternative to joining in was to identify the potential issue with Thatcher’s move to privatise this UK state owned business. If I had seen a problem with taking a state owned player in the oil & gas industry away from private ownership then perhaps I’d have made a stance and not applied to get shares. However, as I already explained, this business was not a critical utility nor serving a critical UK infrastructure role so I could not understand the objection to privatisation. So for me there was no stance to take.
Funnily enough, I like pretty much everyone felt ok that from 1979 to 1987 the UK government sold down its majority stake in BP. And the same over the last few years as the government has sold down its majority stake in RBS (now NatWest). Oh, just two others. No - remember British Aerospace, Cable & Wireless, Amersham, Rolls Royce, British Airways, and more. There were many years of taking publicly owned companies into private shareholding. Was there a stance to take over these as well?
PS for water, rail, electricity and the rest I declined to apply for shares as I felt the sell off of critical state and infrastructure assets was wrong. I’m sure my stance there made a massive difference.
Lincs, my narrow view suits my philosophy, formed by watching others locally then extrapolating the perception nationally. I watched the share purchasers around me buy and cash in, playing straight into the hands of the “Big Boys” (remember it was the 80s), then with out much generalization, the same group sold out to redundancy and early pensions from well paid jobs on the pretext of getting trolley pushing jobs for pocket money, could be here all day going into the resultant degradation of workplace T&Cs as a result of this, suffice to say, maybe the only blame for politicians to take wasn’t developing policies but just for planting a seed, then leaving the common man to get on with it.
When a person (probably 15-20 years my senior asks) what happened to this country? I would answer “It could be you”
Thanks for the wider explanation, and of course you are right. The cleverness of the government at the time of the privatisation (and council house sell offs) was to sweeten the medicine with a chance of individual gain. And from that personal gain there became a willingness to vote for the people who had just gifted them a few thousand or more … but those politicians had a wider and less visible agenda. Which is your point about degradation of employment laws and regulations - and which I’d extend to many other facets of life.
Thatcher, the evil witch, really screwed over the British people. If there is a hell, I hope she (and her enablers) are rotting in it.
She said, there’s no such thing as society, unfortunately, she was probably correct.
She certainly did her best to destroy the British sense of community by replacing it with an “economy”. If anybody broke Britain it was her (though Cameron had a very good go)