It seems that every time I get up in the morning some other part of our heritage has been sold off or handed over to people abroad. The merger of Bradford & Bingley into Santander is a case in point, where a perfectly reliable firm is allowed to be taken over to its detriment. According to the BBC News yesterday, the 16th of December, Gordon Brown is alleged to have stated that the Royal Mail is to be partially taken over by a Dutch firm. Sometimes I wonder who is actually steering our ship, is it Brown, Mandelson, or some other adviser without portfolio? The pound has dropped somewhere around 20% compared with the Euro, so if we are importing materials or services, their cost will have risen in the last few months by 20%. The labour charges will be the same in the case of the Post Office, but I suspect the overheads will be in Euros. Why is it we can’t run our own businesses and apparently need help from outside, we used to be the best in the world?
When you start thinking along these lines it suddenly dawns on you that a lot of the foreign produce that has been groaning on the shelves of our supermarkets, and in many cases thrown away, will be a thing of the past, because the profit margins will have gone. We have been allowing vast tracts of our farmland to lie fallow, and the farmers have been finding their labours in many cases unrewarding. If we can’t afford to buy from abroad, it would seem that our eating and buying habits will change radically, and we shall be more dependent on our own produce and products to satisfy our needs. Some of the countries that are going to suffer yet again will be those in Africa and elsewhere, set up for the benefit of the indigenous population to have a wage, no matter how meagre. One thing is certain, when an industry of any sort, is allowed to degenerate in the way that manufacturing and farming in this country have been bypassed, I strongly suspect that there are not the resources of skilled labour and skilled management to make up the shortfall caused be the fallout of the reduction in the value of the pound, and in consequence the need to have our own resources. Recovery could take some time.