racings turkeys vote for a tory christmas

Small town high streets are full of Charity shops and betting shops,,
Here in Leeds there are betting shops opposite each other and often
three or more on the same street within yards of each other..

Hard to believe they are attracting people to bet on horses when you can watch and bet at home. I suppose it is a different mentality in a large town when the shop is round the corner. My nearest is 6 miles away.

The prosperity of the country as a whole is more important than one single industry. And that is why the Conservatives were re-elected.

That's why we are all doomed to a life of Servitude while the fat bankers get richer
and then charge us when their ponzie schemes collapse.

The bank that was run by the Labour party (Co-op) is hardly an advert for nationalizing them.

Nationalized ...don't get me going our Electric is owned by French State run ...
The most unexpected consequence of selling the country’s electric legacy, the consequence that most directly contradicts what the Thatcherites were trying to do, was the gradual absorption of swathes of the industry by EDF. Beginning with the takeover of London Electricity in 1998, exploiting the Thatcherites’ open-door market structures and their decision to split the electricity industry into small, easy-to-swallow chunks, France in effect renationalised the industry its neighbour had so painstakingly privatised. Renationalised it, that is, for France. As well as being one of the six dominant UK suppliers of energy, EDF now owns a fat portfolio of British power stations, including the fleet of nuclear reactors that still provides around a sixth of the country’s electricity.

It was a setback for the pro-market ideologues. Unlike E.ON and RWE, EDF is a state-owned monolith with a near monopoly on the production and supply of electricity in France, run by technocrats and members of a powerful trade union, the Confédération générale du travail (CGT). Its mission is to empower France in foreign markets, and the government agency that owns it, L’Agence des participations de l’Etat, isn’t embarrassed to say so. In her foreword to the agency’s 2010 report, Christine Lagarde – then minister for economic affairs in François Fillon’s cabinet – boasted that the state would be more active than ever in building ‘champions capable of competing with global market rivals’. In Thatcherite terms EDF was a public sector mammoth that would inevitably be hunted to extinction by the hungry and agile competitors of post-privatisation countries like Britain. The laws of economics said so. And yet the opposite happened. The mammoth thrived, and Britain failed to produce new competitors, agile or otherwise.

If the power of EDF in Britain is an embarrassment to neoliberals, does that mean it’s good for their opponents, the pastel-shade socialists of the legacy left? Unison, the British union that represents electricity workers, seems happy. Greg Thomson, Unison’s head of strategic organisation, told me that since it crossed the Channel EDF had gone against prevailing management orthodoxy by reinstating a final salary pension scheme for workers. Unison was given seats with the CGT in an EDF/union body, a ‘European Works Council’, and enough leverage over EDF management to get union recognition for previously non-union workers at a call centre in Sunderland. ‘When London Electricity was privatised, we adopted a policy of returning it to public ownership, and I’m pleased to think I delivered on that,’ Thomson said. ‘Obviously to the wrong nation, but you can’t be too picky.’

Yet EDF’s foreign adventures make Unison’s French counterparts suspicious. They don’t understand why Britain gave away its native electricity industry so easily. A colleague of Thomson’s told me that the CGT was ‘apoplectic’ that Unison didn’t resist in 2010 when EDF sold off the local networks of cables and transformers it owned in East Anglia, London and south-east England to Li Ka-shing, in order to fund its purchase of Britain’s nuclear stations. ‘When the sale went through they were absolutely pissed off because we had done nothing to stop it. They voted to man the barricades.’ Thomson remembered an early trip to a European Works Council meeting in Paris, when one of the CGT men said to him at lunch: ‘There’s only one country that’s stupid enough to sell off its electricity industry, and that’s Britain.’

There are a few private sector banks that would have gone belly up in 2008 if not for public support.

Breedingmad

You can't have written that yourself - after all, you can't even spell Ponzi correctly. Who did you copy it off?

Rolls Royce was also bailed out with Govt dough ..tax payers money by the Conservatives.

I think he might have written the first line.

Pies - I see your point

At least he can spell Koi - I suppose you can get anything right if you repeat it often enough.

Cameron and the tories gave the Tote to Betfred

You can't have written that yourself - after all, you can't even spell Ponzi correctly. Who did you copy it off?

You'll find the real author here........

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n17/james-meek/how-we-happened-to-sell-off-our-electricity

British companies operating abroad far exceed the number of foreign ones here and in any case, it is shareholders that own companies, not countries.