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Sell-offs will be a disaster
• YOUR leader (The darker side of more power cuts, Feb 22) has much wider ramifications than the control and supply of power in Britain, vital as that is.
It is symptomatic of our experience of privatisation generally and also of the laissez-faire attitude of government towards foreign acquisitions of British companies.
Privatisation must rank as the greatest confidence trick in history. Assets are stolen from the public and then sold to back them.
The consequence of this fraud has been that vital utilities have been allowed to slip from effective British control and politicians allowed to escape their responsibility for ensuring that such utilities remain secure and affordable for the public to use.
For example, had power generation remained a public utility, no government would have dared to allow the present extremely dangerous British dependence on supplies of gas from volatile parts of the world to develop or prices to soar through the roof as they have done for the past 18 months.
What is happening is literally mad. It is a re-run of the ‘free trade’ mania of the period 1860-1931, with potentially much greater penalties for Britain because at least in the previous free trade period we retained control of our own borders.
Robert Henderson
Chalton St, NW1
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