A letter a day to number 10. No 1,502
Monday 25 July 2016.
Dear Mrs May,
The privatisation of, er, well, everything, reminds me of Douglas Adams’ title of the fourth book in his ‘Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ trilogy, ‘So long and thanks for all the fish’…
So long tax payers and thanks for all your cash.
Flogging off state assets, PFI’s, Academies, privatising our NHS, public services (water, gas, electricity, buses, ambulances, police, etc.), Royal Mail, you name it, is just a massive con, transferring the nations wealth into private hands.
I don’t think that tax payers generally have got it yet, that all their wealth transferred to the treasury as taxes is regarded by you Tories as just a gigantic corporate slush fund. Call it what you like, class warfare, economic warfare, a giant Ponzi scheme, daylight robbery… With more people now in in-work poverty than out of work poverty, in excess of 40% of their income is siphoned off as taxes to pay for privateers and fat cat salaries. That’s great, isn’t it, cuts to social welfare, money for corporate welfare, meanwhile back at the food banks…
This isn’t the politics of envy, that great get out of gaol free card for those who exploit the tax system, it’s social injustice on a massive scale.
The privatisation myth that, ‘competition promotes excellence and market forces breed efficiency’, is just that, a myth. To take just one, water, in late 2015 it was revealed that private water companies were ripping customers off to the tune of £1.2 billion, whereas Scotland, with its entirely publicly owned water services, is the cheapest in Britain despite a £1.8 billion investment in infrastructure.
Whilst the poorest are subject to forced labour under threat of sanctions and slavery, via Workfare, the nations hard earned money is handed to the boardrooms of vulture capitalists, gathered like bears around a honey pot and these same companies will be paying minimum wages on zero hours contracts to the very people who fund them, to maximise profits, whilst their workers are striving to work their way out of poverty. Fat chance! And the icing on the cake is that many of these privateers avoid paying their taxes through tax avoidance and tax evasion schemes and stash their ill gotten gains in tax havens in British overseas territories and dependencies. Nice, if rampant greed is your thing…
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2014/jun/16/british-public-wrong-rich-poor-tax-research
http://www.poverty.ac.uk/tags/work-poverty
https://www.theguardian.com/healthcare-network/2014/aug/06/privatisation-ripping-nhs-from-our-hands
Fear and Loathing in Great Britain 
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