Keeping the Bailiffs at Bay

No, not me, although I still have an ongoing bailiff problem. No, this time it seems Gordon Brown is desperate to avoid the bailiffs knocking at the door and demanding instant payment that he's announced a sale of government assets.

Far be it from me to ponder the obvious and say that announcing a sale well in advance is the wrong thing to do, but he did exactly the same thing when selling off our gold reserves and look how badly that went.

Most heinous of the assets reportedly for sale is the student loan book. Once in private hands there will be no guarantees to students about their loans: the company owning it can change the terms as they see fit. They may start to charge commercial interest rates, or impose time limits on repayment, or request repayment when graduates are earning less than the current threshold. Its one more nail in the coffin of Labours supposed target of getting 50 percent of people into university. So much for the 1997 promises of "joined up government".

Its yet another indication of where this Labour government insists on wasting money. On the one hand they are spending money encouraging new students, on the other they are discouraging them with uncertainty over student loans. Its wasteful and a sure sign of the psychotic nature of a Labour government that has been in power way too long, one that has spent all the money in the bank account, then taken out massive loans to finance its profligacy and is now desperately trying to sell anything it can in order to keep the bailiffs at bay.

P.S. Another asset for sale is the governments stake in Urenco, the European Uranium Consortium, which processes uranium for the nuclear industry. How gloriously ironic it would be if the company that buys the 33 percent stake turns out to have any links at all to Iran.