My Twitter thread format appears to be popular, with publications lifting them for use in other media.
Prospect did so, again, yesterday:
So too did East Anglia Bylines:
Promoting #Freeports is all about undermining the state and turning it over to private control. And that's the pathway to the end of government as we've known it.
-- @RichardJMurphy warns of the dangers.#LowRegulation#ToryLeadershipContesthttps://t.co/d56bPzbKql
— East Anglia Bylines (@BylinesEast) August 8, 2022
This last one seems to have been especially popular, getting a lot of retweets.
Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:
You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.
And if you would like to support this blog you can, here:
Your comment about ‘chartered cities’ is even more ominous in my view and also believable – I mean, you would not put it past them for the Tories to ape what has happened to some American towns like Flint, Michigan, where the governor has declared emergency powers and literally turned the city into a free for all for free marketeers – what happened to Flint’s public water supply is a lesson and a warning to those of us who need to be aware of stunts like ‘chartered cities’.
Yours gratefully………………………
I saw somewhere a comment to the effect that the City of London’s privileges meant that it wasn’t totally part of the UK (in some sense a separate country) – perhaps the original Freeport/’Charter City’?
To a limited extent, but the argument is not that strong
It occurs that if Labour front benchers actually approve of the move away from nation states to city states then it might explain their silence and general inactivity.
I don’t think they do, at all
I’m not so sure. In fact we don’t know what Labour think at all other than a general agreement with the Tories.
On this subject, I recommend a documentary called “The Lost Leonardo”, which quite apart from telling the fascinating story behind the Salvator Mundi, the most expensive painting ever sold, also lifts the lid on the murky world of freeports. According to the documentary, it is the fate of much of the world’s private-held art, and other high-value physical assets, to end up in freeports, and it has two principle benefits. The first is that goods stored in freeports are considered to be “in transit”, and are therefore conveniently beyond the reach of tax authorities. The second is that these tax-exempt goods can be used as collateral for loans, which in turn can be deployed for further profit. Thus, freeports are of particular use to the world’s billionaires, and it is not hard to join the dots and see why some Conservatives are so keen to see them established in the UK.