Selling Off The Family Silver

By Dave Stevens.  

The Government’s Office for National Statistics has revealed that more than half the shares in quoted UK companies are now in foreign hands. Ten years ago, only a third of these shares were foreign owned. 20 years ago it was only 13%. Successive Governments, Tory, Labour and Tory/LibDem have pressed on regardless with a policy of selling British commerce and industry to foreigners.

Where they are not imported, the cars on our roads are now made here to profit foreigners. Once great British carmaker Rover was sold off to Germany’s BMW in 1994. They ruthlessly asset-stripped it, selling Land Rover to the US’s Ford who sold it off in turn, along with another great British marque Jaguar, to India’s Tata Motors in 2008. BMW held on to the Mini, a superb British design now made in Britain to enrich Germans. MG Rover is now owned by the Chinese.

Whilst our once proudest motoring marques, Rolls Royce and Bentley, have been in German hands, BMW and Volkswagen respectively, since 1998.

Another proud British motoring name, Aston Martin, is supposedly back in British hands. But whilst the consortium that bought it back off Ford, Prodrive, has an address in Oxfordshire it is largely bankrolled by American Stock Market sharks and Kuwaiti oil sheiks, while last year 37.5% of the firm was flogged off to Italian market speculators.

Matters are no better in our shops. “Buy British” has become a joke. For example last year the trade magazine The Grocer and research firm Nielsen discovered that of the biggest 150 best-selling brands of groceries in British shops only 44 are actually British-owned. Of the 91 grocery brands founded in the UK, only 36 are still owned by British companies. The rest have been gobbled up by foreign multinationals and overseas private equity groups.

For example, HP Sauce was founded by Nottingham grocer Frederick Gibson Garton over a century ago. When he found his sauce was being used in the Houses of Parliament, he named it “HP”. In 2005 this quintessentially British product was swallowed up by US-based multinational Heinz. That shark was in turn devoured earlier this year by a pack of two bigger sharks, notorious international speculator Warren Buffett’s blandly-named Berkshire Hathaway and a bunch of Brazilian speculators, 3G Capital. Who still have the sauce to put our Houses of Parliament on their foreign-owned product.

Weetabix, first made in 1932 in Burton Latimer, Northamptonshire, since 2012 has been 60% owned by the Chinese Bright Foods. Weetabix had already taken over Alpen and Ready-Brek. As the firm’s new owners, like everything else in China, are ultimately controlled by the Chinese Communist Party perhaps the latter will now be rebranded as Red-i-Brek!

Branston Pickle, of which Britons consume 28 million jars a year, was originally made in the Burton-on-Trent suburb of Branston in 1922 by then British Firm Crosse & Blackwell. Crosse & Blackwell is now owned by a consortium of American and Japanese multinationals, but Branston Pickle had been sold off separately earlier, firstly to foodstuff speculator Sir Harry Solomon’s Premier Foods, owners of Hovis, Oxo, Bisto and Mr Kipling Cakes, and then by them to Japanese multinational Mizkan, which already owned Sarson’s Vinegar and Hayward’s Pickled Onions,

The bitter taste of foreign takeover is no sweeter in the confectioner’s. Cadbury’s, founded in 1824 in Birmingham, was grabbed by US-based multinational Kraft Foods in 2010. Whilst our other leading confectioner, Rowntree Mackintosh, founded in York in 1862, was thrown to the Stock Market sharks in 1987 – “floated” as the City laughably puts it – and gobbled up the very next year by Swiss-based global multinational Nestle.

It’s no good drowning your sorrows down the pub either. Britain’s largest brewer, Scottish and Newcastle, was jointly taken over by the Dutch chemical lager producer Heineken and its Danish counterpart Carlsberg. Whilst the second biggest brewer is US-based multinational Coors, which has gulped down great British brewers like Bass, Worthington and Mitchell and Butler. Revealing the smoke and mirrors around the Capitalist “branding” con-trick, Carlsberg lager in British pubs is brewed by Coors, not Carling-owned S&N, whilst Bass bitter is brewed not by Coors, who took over Bass, but by the world’s biggest brewer, Anheuser-Busch InBev, who also own “global brands” of cosmopolitan pap such as Becks, Stella Artois, Budweiser etc.

This tangle of many brands sold in Britain being owned by a few giant global multinationals who export most of the profits they squeeze from British consumers to foreign shareholders is in fact typical of Global Market Capitalism. Most of the world’s food, drink, and household goods, for example, are owned by the mega-multinationals Pepsico, the Coca-Cola Company, Kraft, Nestle, Mars, Procter & Gamble, and Unilever. Unilever alone owns no less than 400 brands sold in the shops.

Most British airports, seaports, and railways, as well as our energy suppliers, are foreign owned. As your gas and electricity bills soar, doesn’t it give you such a warm charitable glow at this Festive Season to think of all the stock market speculators, oil sheiks and cosmopolitan global fat cats around the world you are making even richer? Goodwill to a few, very rich, men…

Amazingly, successive British Governments of every stripe are actually proud of selling off our industrial and commercial silver. They boast that Britain is “open for business” and crow about foreign “inward investment”. They trumpet every penny invested in Britain by foreigners, but don’t tell you the foreigners only do this because – of course! – they expect to take out of our country and people in profits more than they put in via inward investment.

Inward investment is a global speculators’ sprat to catch a profitable mackerel, fat profits squeezed out of the British people and shipped overseas. They rub their hands with glee at the prospect of British workers toiling to enrich Japanese, American and Arab speculators and, ever more, a cosmopolitan deracinated elite of the global super-rich.

As nationalists, we see nothing to celebrate about selling off our country and the fruits of our British inventiveness and hard work to rich foreigners and global multinationals. We want our family silver back! Goods in British shops should as far as possible be made or grown in Britain by British workers for British firms to profit British people. Wherever possible the British people who actually made or grew them.