The British poodle
Would the government kick up a stick if it was an American individual who bought this stake? Good boy, here's another bone.
The UK government has kicked off a national security assessment on the investment in BT by French telco tycoon Patrick Drahi, who via his Altice UK organisation topped up his stake to 18 percent late last year. Announced today, the probe is understood to be one of the first such uses of new powers the UK government granted …
Look at what happened to Cobham, bought by a US outfit and now at the mercy of some venture capital group this is busily engaged in breaking it up in to pieces and selling them "to realise their investment".
In real world speak, get rid of the IP and any assets, siphon all the money out, load it with debt and cast the resulting inviable mess to the wolves.
For far too long the UK has just let some fantastically successful companies be bought and destroyed.
Cadbury
Arm
Cobham
The energy supply companies
BNFL Nuclear (I think that is what they were)
The list goes on......
There is a policy position somewhere between state ownership and owned by nasty old foreigners you know.
Also, this government didn't put it on the stock market, it was already there when they came to power. So again, there is a perfectly reasonable policy position between giving somewhat of a shit who owns it, without wanting to control it through government.
Personally I quite like the compromise of saying some companies run important infrastructure, so they can be on the stock market, but can't be controlled by anywone without approval - and are also highly regulated.
The water companies for example did a lot more dumping of raw sewage when they were owned by the government. Because the government was both in charge of regulating them, and in charge of providing the money for better sewage treatment. Hence it went easy on regulating them, as the cheaper choice. Now the government has more of an incentive to regulate them properly, because the Treasury don't have to stump up the cash - which they might rather spend on popular things like tax cuts or NHS spending.
Just to clarify - British Telecommunications was privatised in 1984 by the Conservative Party.
In general, the Conservative party (over a number of years/governments) have has a policy to privatise utilities. My guess would be for the following key reasons
1 - Free money - they get lots of money without having to raise taxes
2 - Unions - they can avoid getting involved in industrial action by saying that the companies are private and nothing to do with them.
all well and good - but if you don't regulate properly then eventually you will be up a creek without a paddle. Unfortunately for the country, the Conservatives are also big fans of light touch regulation.Which shows that you can't have your (privatisation) cake and eat it too.
If the foreigners own a bunch of your power plants and start messing around, then you send in the police to sieze them. Woohoo! Free nationalisation! And company have lost all their investment. Most of the workers aren't local, this would be pretty easy to do.
If the nasty foreigners own your major telecoms network, they might start spying on it. And if they don't have to disrupt things and risk their investment in order to gain advantage. Traditionally spying on other peoples' communications has been what we do to foreigners. And after all, everyone knows you can't trust the French...