I have never trusted a politician since I was a lad in short pants, but the proposals of John McDonnell, Labour's 'Chancellor in Waiting' really do take the biscuit.
In fine Marxist tradition, he has promised that all manner of largesse will be showered on those stupid enough to vote Labour in the next General Election, whenever that is. His latest wheeze is to promise to re-nationalize the railways, apparently at no cost; at least, he says that it will require no government borrowing.
Now, in my book, buying things costs money and nationalizing industries is, actually, buying things. Of course, in Marxist dictatorships, companies are simply stolen from their previous owners without any compensation being paid, but the UK is not yet a Marxist dictatorship, unless things have changed while I was having a kip. Currently, the rail infrastructure is owned by the state owned Network Rail, but the rolling stock and services are provided by an assortment of other organisations; some of these are private companies and some are controlled by state owned monopolies - not owned by the British government but by German, French, Dutch and others. For instance, the ubiquitous 'Arriva' is owned by the German state-backed company Deutsche Bahn, while a range of services are operated by Dutch state-controlled Abellio, Govia is backed by both French and Canadian public funds, and there is also involvement from Italian and Japanese state-owned companies as well as others. In other words, if McDonnell wants to privatize the railways, he'll have to pay off various foreign governments to do it. That will cost money.
If he's serious about doing this without incurring any additional borrowing, how's he going to do it ? The various companies have contracts and have invested large sums of money in rolling stock. Yes, the tracks and stations are already state owned, but the trains themselves aren't; is McDonnell planning to steal these from the current operators, including Governments, or buy new stock ? What about the anticipated returns which the current operators expect to make over the coming decades ? Whatever his plans, McDonnell will have problems and it will cost him, actually us, a fortune.
There is, of course, one way in which all this nationalization could be managed without borrowing any money. How silly of me not to realize - he could increase taxes ! He could go back to the dark days of the 1960s when tax rates peaked at 98%. The rich would happily cough up and all would be well, or not. Sadly, the likes of McDonnell live in the days of the "workers' struggle', when 'soak the rich' was the watch word of the socialist elite. In the modern world, such an approach is impossible although this doesn't bother dyed-in-the-wool Marxists; they happily ignore the realities of a world in which 'the rich' simply move, leaving the rest of us to pick up the bill.
Anyone who experienced the strike ridden days of the 1960s and 1970s knows that nationalization doesn't solve anything. Strikes at British Leyland and Ford destroyed our car industry, strikes by coal works, steel workers, ship workers and the rest, all nationalized industries, reduced our industrial base to almost nothing. The only results of nationalization were strikes, unemployment and the eventual demise of the affected industries. That isn't to say that private enterprise has necessarily been a panacea but it certainly hasn't been as bad as is claimed by the likes of John McDonnell. British Gas, British Telecom, British Airways, National Grid and others haven't exactly been failures.
McDonnell is a typical Marxist. He will promise the earth, at no cost, and will deliver only dictatorship and misery. Unfortunately, many of our younger people simply don't remember the days of the old Soviet Union and have no conception of the appalling lives that the people lived under that regime; they don't even remember our own dark days of strikes and 3 day weeks in the 1960s and 70s, when Labour governed and the unions ruled our lives.
They have no knowledge of the old Soviet states or the old eastern European bloc - Hungary, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia (where, I hear many cry !) Romania and Poland, not to mention East Germany, from where the present German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, hails. The old Soviet regime was horrific but McDonnell cares nothing for that. He ignores the inevitable consequence of any dictatorial state, that is, that those who oppose it in any way are eliminated. He is an idealist who happily forgets about the tens of millions murdered under Stalin in Russia and Mao in China; he prefers to concentrate on promising to run the railways well, as did Hitler, to everyone's cost.
No one should be fooled. McDonnell, and his partner in crime Jeremy Corbyn, are dinosaurs who would drag the United Kingdom into a new dark age. Their ideas, as vaguely proposed, may be popular with the uneducated and uninitiated, but no one should be fooled. Given power, they would destroy our country.
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