Friday 22 April 2016 7.30pm
boroughonian wrote:Everything she did, ties in with how the EU is now.
Polish bloke I know says that they privatised their steel industry, and it was promptly shut down.....ring any bells?
I've seen no evidence to suggest that the Tory rush to privatise was due to the influence of the EU. Hard to imagine Thatcher being so keen to pursue the policy if it came from that quarter.
Does the EU oppose the idea of nationalisation and require member states to privatise publicly owned enterprises? I think not; take as an example railways:
In France, both the train operator SNCF and the infrastructure operator RFF are state-owned.
In Germany the state-owned operator Deutsche Bahn runs 90 per cent of passenger services.
In Italy, the state-owned railway company FS Holding owns both the national rail infrastructure manager RFI and train-operating company Trenitalia.
The Spanish railway is almost entirely in public ownership.
(source)
I don't see that the post-privatisation failure of the Polish steel industry says anything in particular about the EU, more about the way that country is choosing to transform its economy.