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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (77575)	8/11/2011 11:17:17 AM
From: Follies	Respond to of 217927

>>Maybe Brazil would like to run a big business - outsourced prisons for UK rioters. Wasn't that a movie with Steve McQueen?

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (77575)	8/11/2011 3:44:33 PM
From: elmatador	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 217927

Sadly, Harry Reid’s analysis of Britain’s chronic problems is completely accurate (“Big Society can’t mend broken Britain”, The Herald, August 9). As a nation and a society, Britain is coming apart at the seams. Social responsibility and social cohesion are declining rapidly and in many inner-city areas any sense of community has been replaced by intolerance, resentment and hatred. Large-scale immigration, particularly in London, the South-east and the Midlands has contributed to the widening and hardening of divisions between ethnic and religious groups. Meanwhile, although delusions of grandeur persist, Britain’s economic powers and international influence are greatly diminished and our old-fashioned political and government systems are ineffective. We are wrestling with all these local problems in the middle of a global financial crisis, with markets in freefall and superpowers locking horns in a futile trial of economic strength. I believe the decline in Britain’s fortunes began soon after the end of the Second World War. Many states within the former Empire were rightly given their independence, but Britain lost a huge source of wealth previously derived from exploiting the resources of these countries. At home, the beginnings of the NHS and the welfare state, while again the right thing to do, started the expansion of the public sector and the gradual development of a dependency and blame culture. In the 1950s and 60s the power of the trade unions demanding higher wage rates gradually made heavy and labour-intensive industries uncompetitive. This took place just as the emerging industrial powers in the Far East were building modern shipbuilding and manufacturing plants, using technology and expertise acquired from us and with wage rates a small fraction of those being paid in Britain. Mrs Thatcher’s determination to break the unions had the effect of killing off large swathes of industry and loss of jobs in coal mining, shipbuilding, steel-making and heavy engineering. As manufacturing declined as Britain’s main source both of exports and job creation, the burgeoning financial sector gradually became our main source of overseas income, producing paper wealth trading in cash, utilities and stocks and shares but creating nothing. The huge one-off windfall of North Sea oil been totally dissipated by successive governments, using it to finance current expenditure instead of rebuilding our ageing national infrastructure and reshaping our economic future. Looking back, it is easy to see that we are today reaping the consequences of all these changes and missed chances, most of them politically-driven, over the past 60-odd years. We keep being told by our political masters that lessons will be learned, but there is precious little evidence of such learning in the recent past. Knee-jerk and ineffective reaction to events is the norm, while the main ambition of most of those who claim to run our nation is political survival. Since both David Cameron and Boris Johnson have now cut short their foreign holidays and returned to take charge, however, I’m sure all our problems will be gone by the weekend. Iain A D Mann, 7 Kelvin Court, Glasgow. http://www.heraldscotland.com/comment/herald-letters/riots-are-the-inevitable-result-of-years-of-a-me-first-culture-1.1116633