Reeves at Davos: "I'm here to sell (off) Britain"

With a little help from my friends at BlackRock

Make me look competent…

Published in The National, January 27th.

At a breakfast meeting in Davos on Wednesday, Rachel Reeves announced, “I am here to sell Britain.” More like “sell off Britain.” In an effort to attract capitalist vultures to feast on the UK carcass which she believes is the answer to her Holy Grail of Growth, she schmoozed with BlackRock’s Larry Fink, Citi’s David Livingstone, JP Morgan’s Filippo Gori and Morgan Stanley’s Ted Pick.

Reeves with her good friend Larry Fink, who can’t hide his delight

Reeves is turning to these guys because she thinks the government has no money of its own - even though it owns a central bank that creates all the money in the UK - so must rely on private capital to fix the UK’s crumbling infrastructure. An English Labour lackey joked that “the party would be getting BlackRock to rebuild Britain.”

In a statement released today outlining her plans to “turbocharge investment across the UK”, Reeves said:

At Davos I’ve been telling some of the world’s biggest investors that the U.K. is a safe bet for their investments, whether that’s in London or Leeds.

Gullible Reeves has swallowed Fink’s snake oil sales pitch that the British state is broke and therefore incapable of creating the trillions required to repair and expand the UK’s tattered infrastructure. So he’s told her that if the government ponies up £7.3bn in subsidies it will attract 3 times as much from private capital. What isn’t said is that BlackRock and others of its ilk will end up owning UK infrastructure outright and enjoy a perpetual and steady source of revenue to boot.

Through its purchase last year of Global Infrastructure Partners, BlackRock holds £150bn in infrastructure assets including Edinburgh Airport and Clydeport, part of Peel Ports Group, that owns ports in Glasgow, Greenock, Hunterston and Ardrossan.

https://www.peelports.com/port-locations/clydeport#:~:text=Location,as%20well%20as%20European%20hubs.

And BlackRock owns or has stakes in both onshore and offshore wind projects in Scotland.

The 31-megawatt wind “Tormywheel” farm is located in West Lothian and has been operational since March 2017.

https://www.greeninvestmentgroup.com/en/news/2016/glid-wind-farms-acquired-by-the-uk-green-investment-bank-offshore-wind-fund-and-funds-managed-by-blackrock.html

Fink’s BlackRock also owns GLID Wind Farms’ other operating asset, the 26 MW Glens of Foudland onshore wind farm in Aberdeenshire.

English Labour is putting the final nail in the public sector’s coffin. Private finance was never needed for public infrastructure investment. The government could easily provide the money for less than the asset stripping private sector, and it would own its assets, not BlackRock.

English Labour has learned nothing from Gordon Brown’s disastrous PFI initiative that not only lumbered Scotland with debts of £30bn but also left it with substandard schools and hospitals.

Shamefully, the colonial Scottish administration has offered no resistance to and in many cases has gone along with the privatisation of our public assets. Remember Kate ‘Freeport’ Forbes? Or Nicola Sturgeon’s scandalous ‘auction’ of the ScotWind offshore wind leases for a one-off payment of £700m, a fraction of their estimated value of £14bn? Or the more recent renewable energy ‘superhighway’ that’s cabling Scottish renewables to England for a pittance?

Scotland’s latest humiliation is the shuttering of our only oil refinery at Grangemouth, owned by another private company, PetroIneos, a joint venture between Ineos and Petro China. The Scottish administration didn’t put up much of a fight to save it and hundreds of job. Viceroy Murray intoned a couple of days ago on the floor of the Westminster cesspit that its closure was “regrettable.”

I’ll tell you what’s really regrettable: that Scotland is still stuck in this failing union.