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Neoliberalism In Britain: Forty Years of Abysmal Failure
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Privatization was for a long time, a very dirty word in British politics.
No politician — Labour, Liberal or Conservative — was prepared to put his or her head above the parapet and beat the drums of the private ownership of the means of production in the decades following the second world war.
But the 1970s were such a turbulent time in Britain.
The unions were at their recalcitrant worst and it seemed that country which colonized a quarter of the globe might go under altogether.
And it was against the backdrop of imminent collapse that Britain elected the Conservatives in 1979.
And It was Britain’s first woman prime minister who dared to do what no one else would, when she decided to sell what Harold Macmillan called the ‘family silver’.
Margaret Thatcher’s view back then was that the government had got too big and it was essential to roll back the frontiers of state and this was going to happen by way of privatizing the commanding heights of the British economy —Railways, telecommunications, energy and water.
But what isn’t often pointed out enough is that these companies at the time of their sale to private owners had zero debt.