GG. wrote: ↑Mon Oct 21, 2019 12:40 pm
Yes, there is, and the argument is easier to make for utilities and even the above suggestion on empty commercial properties (though of course much less easily justified for residential). Even so, the financial outlay would be ruinous -
an estimated 200bn and a 10% increase in the total national debt just for the upfront cost and that doesn't take into account ongoing capex on infrastructure (SSE alone have put in 100bn since privatisation for example), the effect to pension funds who hold shares in theses business, etc. etc..
Would that be this £299Bn?
"A few days ago the BBC produced a fear-mongering headline claiming that Labour's renationalisation plans would "cost £196 billion", based on what can only loosely be described as 'research' by the CBI business lobby.
The figure soon started to look incredibly shady, because the calculation clearly failed to factor in numerous things, like the incomes generated for the state by nationalised utilities and services, and the direct savings to consumers once they're freed from paying the lavish dividends and bloated executive salaries of corporate profiteers.
This conceit of treating all government spending and investment as if it's essentially just "waste" with no returns on investments isn't new, in fact the assumption that all government spending is essentially waste is the flaw at the heart of austerity fanaticism which resulted in the slowest post-crisis economic recovery in centuries, the worst wage collapse since records began, soaring rates of poverty, a crippling UK productivity crisis, and the eventual Brexit backlash.
Then it turned out that beyond the CBI's absurd characterisation of state investment as nothing more than waste, it turns out that they simply falsified their figures to make Labour's rail renationalisation plan look vastly more expensive than it actually was.
When challenged on their false figures the CBI responded by admitting their error in the most mealy-mouthed way possible, implying that it was OK to brief the press with false figures because they "assumed" what Labour's policy would be rather than actually bothering to check!
And to make matters worse they're now outright refusing to show how they calculated their £196 billion total because ... and you'll like this ... "unfortunately we are unable to provide a breakdown of the £196bn figure as our members do not feel comfortable doing this"!
So their members feel 'comfortable' priming the press with inaccurate figures to feed to the public, but they 'do not feel comfortable' offering any explanation whatever of how these figures were compiled.
This inflated and utterly unjustified £196 billion figure was obviously uncritically regurgitated by all of the typical hard-right propaganda outlets like the Daily Mail, Express, and S*n.
You wouldn't expect lazy hard-right propaganda hacks to actually fact check the anti-Labour propaganda they're hand delivered, but if the BBC is to be considered the impartial source it pretends to be, the minimum you'd expect would have been for them to have fact-checked the claims, and at the absolute minimum made clear in their headline that the £196 billion figure is not a fact established by independent experts, but rather a misleading estimate drawn up on the back of an envelope, via a secret methodology, by a hyper-partisan right-wing business lobby group.
But this failure of due diligence by the BBC looks even more awful when we look back to their outrageous decision not to cover the British Medical Journal estimate that Tory austerity fanaticism in the health and social care system caused 120,000 excess deaths, citing supposed methodological doubts about the study as their reason to completely ignore the report and its devastating findings.
It turns out that when one of the most respected medical journals in the world criticises Tory policy, the BBC pore through the methodology in order to find literally any excuse to completely ignore it, but when a clearly biased business lobby group produce a profoundly misleading piece of anti-Labour propaganda, the BBC blare it out in their headlines, and don't even ask to see the methodology, which remains absolutely shrouded in secrecy to this day!
You couldn't ask for a more glaring example of double-standards from our supposedly 'impartial' national broadcaster."
I think the post where you said "I would immediately pay thousands more in tax" is the real reason you fear a Labour Government. I am not slamming you for that, I would likely be similarly unenthusiastic about being taxed a lot mire.