Loathe as I am to be drawn away from the closing moments of the French Open Tennis Final (update - well done Federer !), I find it just incredulous that in its dying days the Labour government is;
ii) Only the Sunday Telegraph has picked it up - doesn't this show how dire our public finances are when Gordon Brown is in favour of a major privatisation programme?
iii) Real Estate - a terrible americanism - is creeping into our language. By that I mean, if property or landed assets are Real Estate, what is Unreal Estate? (Ok, I'm a hypocrite, I wrote this piece The End of the Global Real Estate Boom? in August 2006 for World Finance magazine which I would immodestly suggest was spot on)
I can see good arguments for the sell-off and not least moving large chunks of government out of London. And I'm not sure whether the £370 bn figure quoted - approx 30% of annual GDP - includes chronically underused buildings and land owned by local government, the Highways Authority, Network Rail and almost certainly not the UK's extensive seabed resources, managed by the Crown Estate.
But there are some strategic areas which the government has not thought through the implications of these sales in the recent past. For example, the sell-off of Chelsea Barracks means that it's much harder to deploy the army, quickly, in Central London in an unspecified emergency. Let's call that scenario a Black Swan event. I for one, would not want to bet that this would never be necessary, ever again, in the 21st Century.
That's why I feel strongly that when it comes to expenditure cuts and capital raising, it's high time the majority of our political class (with the honourable exception of the Conservatives' excellent Shadow Defence Team and some others) stopped regarding our defence and security interests as a peripheral activity of government.
Sadly, there are echoes here of 1996 when the last Conservative Government sold tens of thousands of forces’ homes, raising £1.4billion, but it and the subsequent government only used £100million of the proceeds to set aside for forces’ living accommodation. That short-sighted decision played no small part in our armed forces recruitment and retention shortfalls thereafter.
My question is, without serious strategic input, where does it all end - will they be looking to sell off Fire and Police Stations in valuable built-up areas too?
Unlike the last two governments, this time, a future government must pay close attention to the security implications of these property disposals and act wisely - for all our long-term interests.
