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Originally Posted by British-Conservatism
Former UK companies that Thatcher sold are now very often in foreign hands.
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I think Thatcher went about privatisation in the wrong way (consider again rail privatisation). But why shouldn't the companies that pay to drill the oil get the money for doing so?
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Oil and Gas for example is a ridiculous situation where these companies sell our oil resources and gas resources abroad then we have to import from the likes of Russia.
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Just out of simplicity, lets say our oil sold for 2 dollars a unit and theirs sold for one dollar a unit. We could get twice as much oil. Why would we want to hurt our economy? Obviously it is much more complex than this, but you get the general idea.
Furthermore, oil is not a general substance, not all oil can be used in all oil processes. For example, we have Brent crude, but you also get WTI or Dubai Crude and so on.
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We should be trying to become self sufficient.
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An impossibility. You are opening our country up for more damage from foreign nations than I am.
Look at the quote in my signature.
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As for trade it's very much about competition between nations Russia and China understand this totally.
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Two extreme socialist nations - my point exactly. Furthermore, if China decimated its foreign markets it would destroy itself. People believe that the USA is in China's back pocket because of the huge trade deficit. However, if the two countries were to stop trading, China would be hurt far more than the USA would. The USA would lose out on many products, which is not as bad as China losing out on hundreds of billions of dollars every year. It's economy would slump.
The two need each other. Their animosity towards one another is just a facade. If they really distrusted one another, something would have been done about it.
As for Russia, I could barely think of any industrialised country I would wish to emulate less than Russia.
Again, take the example of Britain and France. If France were our only trading partner and vice versa. We would hope that the people of France become wealthier as our people do in order to sustain our wealth and in turn make us even wealthier as they buy more of our products at higher prices. Both countries benefit. Trade and competition are completely different things and the two must be separated.
A trade will never occur unless both parties benefit (except in cases of knowing generosity, fraud or stupidity).
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Hence why Russia is nationalising huge swaths of its energy industry and now trying to nationalise ours.
National independence depends on economic independence.
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Eurosceptic Atlantacist provided the perfect response to this. If Russia were acting maliciously towards us and a Russian owned company decided to switch off our electricity supply, we would just nationalise it then sell it off to the highest bidder once the crisis was over. The workers and the infrastructure would all be on British soil.
Not to mention I don't think that this would ever happen.