P & O to be bought by Dubai Ports - British reaction, please

[muriel_volestrangler]

After a few months of bidding, it looks like P & O is going to be bought by Dubai Ports, which is owned by the Dubai government (a Singapore government-owned company was also bidding). They had already hived off the cruise line; as well as the ferries and frieght transport companies you see their name on, they run terminals at 29 ports around the world, eg they own 51% of the Southampton container terminal. 6 of these are in the USA.

The American DUers seem a little worried about this, eg "911 Bankers to run 6 major US ports - Impeach Now!"; "Bush puts al Qaida financiers in charge of our ports"; "MIHOP"; "Why is dumbshit putting terrorists in charge of our ports?"; "we get the loose and free terror bankers"; "US Port Security outsourced to ARABS!"; "an open invitation for terrorists to attack our ports"; "they are selling our Ports of Entry off to our enemies who truly did participate in 9/11???"; "Any amount of American blood for money. eh bush?"; "Who can't see this as selling our country off and leaving it vulnerable to foreign attack?"; "This is absoluted obscene and ridiculous"; "this will make the bushmilhousegang's drug smuggling easier - they are in the drug business you know"; "These thieves are selling our country out from under us"; "Secret Bush plan to break the dockworker's unions and do the next 9/11?"
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=116x12451
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x2454971
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x2102309

Am I underreacting? Since Southampton is only a few miles down the road, should I be keeping an eye out for a mushroom cloud? While it seems nice that they've been so trusting about a British company being a good owner of their port facilities, isn't it going a bit far to accuse the Dubai government of being terrorists? Isn't this reaction a bit, you know, 'anti-Arabic'?

[FBBulldog]

1. Frankly, that's a typically American response...

although one that I'd have thought more likely on FR that on DU.

Oddly enough, the Freepers are quite restrained on the issue

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1576940/posts

[muriel_volestrangler]

3. Well, some of them are restrained

but quite a few in this other thread have the "treason!" reaction: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1576547/posts

[FBBulldog]

5. Ah yes!

I should have known better!

Good old Freepers! They can always be relied on for a large dollop of xenophobic hysteria.

I'd post there myself but...

.. they won't let me!

[fedsron2us]

2. The bidding was between a Singapore company

with very close ties to the Chinese government and a company run by the Dubai state. The fact that the victors happen to be Arabs I think is irrelevant. The more serious question is whether this is another results of the British government's crazy infatuation with the 'market' which has resulted in substantial chunks of the UK's infrastructure being sold off to companies that are essentially run by foreign states. There is also the small question of whether there can ever really be a true free market in shipping when nearly all the country's ports are in the hands of one business. I am waiting for a government minister to explain to me why it is wrong for the British state to own and run key utilities but perfectly acceptable for these same assets to be owned by foreign nationalised companies. Still I suppose ideological consistency has never really been our rulers strong points. I doubt whether a single one of them has ever read let alone understood Adam Smith's 'Wealth of nations'. All they really care about is getting some nice well remunerated non executive Directorships once their days in office are over.

On edit - This piece in the Observer really says it all -

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1707900,00.html

[muriel_volestrangler]

4. Yes, I can see that, though P & O aren't involved in many British ports

so they don't have a monopoly. It's ABP, their partner in Southampton, which handles about a quater of British trade - and that was privatised in 1983, one of the first things to go - http://www.foe.co.uk/resource/briefings/ukplc_abp.pdf .

I was just about to point you at the Observer story when I saw you'd linked to it in your edit!

[Taxloss]

6. Well, it's sad to see P&O move out of British hands.

Pilkington, also, has been bought by the Japanese, I read in the Sundays.

As for the TERROR HORROR THREAT I think it's overblown to say the least. First of all, even if the Dubai government was scheming to attack the West, I think they would have firstly done something less prominent than purchase P&O and secondly would have done it through a maze of front companies. If the Dubai government blew up Southampton with a nuclear bomb, it would quickly find HMS Vengeance sitting off its coast having Fun With Fission.

Also, in terms of the UK, ships are subject to a hell of a lot of authorities other than their owners. The near-fascistic power of HM Revenue & Customs for a start. I imagine the USA is the same, despite the Bush administration's Keystone Kops approach to security.

[fedsron2us]

7. The terror threat scare is just ludicrous

If you wanted to bring a nuclear device into Britain you would just hire a container not buy half the ports in Britain. The real issues are those outlined in the Observer article and in the long run they could be just as as devastating to the British economy as any weapon.

[Nihil]

14. OT: Pilks been bought?

Bugger. I grew up in the shadow (ok, soot cloud) of Pilkington's
main factory and used to nick carrots from the fields on the old man's
estate. Shame that yet another of the UK's historic companies has
been sold overseas to the highest bidder.

Ah well, I return you to the topic after a red-wine fuelled nostaglic detour.

[Taxloss]

17. Nippon Sheet Glass bought it.

I don't think they'll ditch the name, it's a brand worth millions.

[Kipling]

19. Not yet. But probably.

We've already lost all our white goods companies, most of our materials companies, and and all our carmakers. I'm surprised Blair still bothers with elections. Why not just flog the whole country on ebay every 4 years?
The really grim thing is that Nippon Glass is a quarter of the size of Pilkington, and yet the takeover could never go the other way. Britain is the only country on earth who would allow it. By selling our industry to the highest bidder we send a clear message to our youth: Britain is crap, and it needs to be run by foreigners to be productive. Now I'm the first to admit that Britain is a bit crap in places, but we could at least TRY.

[moggie]

23. Don't you mean "Great British hands"?

Here's the chimp at a "roundtable interview" on the subject:

And I want those who are questioning it to step up and explain why all of a sudden a Middle Eastern company is held to a different standard than a Great British [sic] company.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/02/20060221-1.html

Jesus, he doesn't even know how to refer to us!

[Benbow]

8. The more "stakeholding" the Arab world has in the UK, the less

likely we are to be bombed. The pal-ier the Saudi princes are with people who own and race horses in the UK, the safer we are. Arab countries are far nastier that Brits are to people who upset the applecart. I think that it will bring benefits.

Where's the outrage when Japanese companies buy British companies? There was some "outrage" when, I think, the French won a contract to run trains and railway stations in south-east England (although they may since have lost it). I don't have a problem with Arabs and Muslims.

Cue hysterical Freeper-reaction, usually involving mandatory wearing of hijabs. I don't have a problem with women wearing hijabs, if they want to.

[T_i_B]

11. Well all the ports still charge extra for Port Security.

So you just hope that they are actually spending that extra revenue on security.

[tjwmason]

9. Let's see - greater threat to British lifestyle

Dubai company buying a port - increasingly authoritarian government in Westminster....

I think I know which way I'll go with that.

[sweetheart]

10. Is it normal to be ruled by the people you conquor?

Is it normal to be ruled by people you defeat,
asks the anglo saxon assault on asia's desert oily sand,
Wonders yankee blues ruled by a plantation elite,
of a reconstructed confederate corporate market grandstand.
Wonders England ruled by a scots mental hell,
Merkel's unemployed "ost" defeated frankfurt's hessian hand,
Trustbusters have defeated IBM and Ma Bell,
And this is not written on a computer on a global digital plan.

Bolivia's ruled by a coca grower socialist,
And so it fits columbia's ruled by FARC and Russia by the Chechen clan,
Israel is ruled by its original haganagh gist,
loomed over today by the karma that has released from the can.
And we are all ruled of a nuclear terror,
we conquored the atom, now we await threats and an error.

[T_i_B]

12. I wouldn't take any notice of the opinions of DUer's...

...where shipping and freight forwarding is concerned Muriel. The shipping industry is seen by quite a few people on DU as being an evil capitalist/globalist plot to take all our jobs and exploit the 3rd world and any attempt to point out that this is not the case in real life is usually the cue for a good old-fashioned dollop of left-wing abuse.

If foreign ownership really is an issue (which it isn't IMO, I don't care who owns the ports as long as they do a good job), then surely Felixstowe is more of a cause for concern then P&O? There are much more important issues here, such as why ships enter UK ports full and leave empty, and the impact of rising fuel prices. Oh, and then there is the matter of how much further Southampton port can expand to meet the rising level of imports. Plenty of bigger fish in the sea really.

[fedsron2us]

13. My experience of working for a couple of major IT multinationals

is that the location of ownership is important. One of my employers was American and all the major business decisions were taken in Texas. The other company was French and very much orientated around its Paris headquarters. In both cases many of the support and ancillary services together with a large number of the associated jobs were located in the home country. Each company treated its UK workforce very much as second class citizens even though they generated a good proportion of the respective firms profits. My real beef about this case is that both the companies bidding to takeover PO were effectively state owned enterprises under the ultimate control of foreign governments. Why is it acceptable for a foreign nationalised industry to run a business in the UK such as the ports but not for a corporation owned by the British public to do likewise. Surely if state owned monopolies are 'bad things' that operate against the public interest and encourage inefficiency then this must apply regardless of whether the government is that of the UK or Dubai or Singapore. It also need to be borne in mind that many of the foreign companies that have been taking over British enterprises in the past decade are often themselves protected from similar bids by their own country's national laws. The possible malign side effects of this situation has been perfectlly illustrated by the recent distortion the natural gas market . Despite the fact that British consumers and industry were paying some of the highest gas prices in the world the country had great difficulty in attracting sufficient supplies of this commodity. The supposed free market solution did not work because many continental suppliers under pressure from their national governments chose to satisfy their domestic demand rather than chase the higher profits that were available in the UK. What is even more worrying is that some states such as Russia are prepared to use the commercial clout of their biggest companies as a means of exercising political influence over foreign governments. If Gazprom was to bid to take over British Gas as was rumoured earlier this year then citizens of the UK might find their energy supplies largely under the control of Vladimir Putin. I am not sure that this is an experience that they would enjoy.

[Nihil]

15. Why are the "American DUers" worried about this?

The whole f*cking US is being run by al Qaeda financiers so why fret
about Airstrip One all of a sudden?

If they want to worry about Dubai being "in charge" of a few ports then
they'd better stop ignoring the security ownership of all of the 9/11
airports plus the twin towers and quit bleating about "tinfoil" whenever
someone points out the bleeding obvious.

Southampton is about 40 miles down the road from me but any mushroom
cloud is more likely to come from a certain unmarked site on a kink in
the A340 near Aldermaston than via a container.

[muriel_volestrangler]

16. It's not the UK they're worried about, it's the 6 ports in the USA

The most extreme reaction yet: "Countries like the U.A.E., Saudi Arabia (oh especially this piece of CRAP country, scumbags), Yemen, Pakistan, etc., are where the REAL heros of the USA SHOULD BE, and NOT Iraq. Sorry if I sound militant here, but why didn't we make tolietbowl countries like them into parking lots on Sept. 12th, 2001?" http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x405756

And that's the OP - which has got 15 recommendations for the 'greatest' list, in under 3 hours. :eyes:

To me, this isn't a security problem. But 95% of the DUers in the threads have leapt on this as 'Bush putting terrorists in charge'. I see it, as others here have, as a sad reflection on the decline of British industry - even with oil and gas, we have a current account deficit, and those extra pounds going abroad are coming back to buy up the companies. Working for a subsidiary of a foreign company does mean that you're more likely to be targeted for cuts if profits go down (though most of Dubai Ports is outside the partent country, so at least teh UK jobs won't be such an obvious target).

The horrible thing is the tone of the comments sometimes stray from 'nationalist' to 'racist', eg the quote above.

[CJCRANE]

18. This just illustrates

who Bushco's real paymasters are and...
what we've known all along) - the War on Terror is a sham.
9/11 was a set-up with elements in the "toiletbowl countries" close to Bushco which gave them the "cataclysmic event" they needed to gain the political will for pre-emptive wars against Iraq (and prob Iran) who had nothing to do with 9/11.

These "toiletbowl countries" are in on the scam that's why Bushco doesn't attack them.

[Kipling]

20. Not the decline"of British industry - the garage sale.

P&O is a successful company. It has excellent prospects with a good placing in China. But the City of London would rather skim some profit today than get jobs for their country tomorrow. Yet another betrayal of the ordinary man by the bastards who lead him. And that's the way Britain has always been: the Battle of the Somme is a good example.

[PaulaFarrell]

21. don't know if I count as british

but I have lived here 15 years and also used to work for P & O. I was completely against the deal due to issues like potential reflagging of ships (Dover depends a lot on P & O for employment) but as far as I understand DP is a pretty good operator, and apparently they are also putting money into the pension plan. I am against selling off national assets like this because they were in essence bought and paid for by the people using them, but I am completely fed up with the hysteria and the mischaracterisation of this deal. And no one will answer my question as to whether they would have been upset if PSA had bought P & O instead.

gee, it's good to see some sanity. all the hoo-hah almost makes me want the deal to go through

[fedsron2us]

22. Well to play devil's advocate

Bush only has itself to blame for the problems he is experiencing getting this buyout ratified. His administration has spent the past five years hyping up the terror threat from the Arab world. He can hardly blame people for believing him.

Apart from that point there is really little to choose between the PSA and Dubai Ports bids. Both are essentially foreign state owned enterprises bidding to buy US and British assets. Why it is acceptable for overseas nationalised companies to run UK businesses but not the British state is a subject on which I eagerly await an explanation from one of those 'free market' enthusiasts who so dominate all our political parties these days.

[T_i_B]

24. Well this is the thing

And no one will answer my question as to whether they would have been upset if PSA had bought P & O instead.

That's because the people pontificating about this on DU know absolutly nothing whatsoever about the shipping industry. They can't answer your question because they simply don't know what they are talking about. It appears that nobody on this board knows the difference between PSA and Hutchinson Port Holdings or the exact details about who is getting what out of P&O being carved up.

If you want something to get worried about, then the robbery down in Tonbridge this week should be more then enough cause for concern. However, it seems that some folk just want something to vent their anger at, no matter how little reason there is behind it.

[fedsron2us]

25. The controversy surrounding this takeover

has ramifications way beyond the shipping industry. What we are seeing are the first signs of serious restiveness about globalised capital markets from politicians and media pundits. These doubts are being expressed not just by the usual suspects on the left but even Republican US senators and conservative journalists in the pages of papers such as the Daily Mail. A not dissimilar storm has been brewing in Spain about the proposed bid by German energy giant EON for the Spanish company Endesa

http://tinyurl.com/qv9n7

One of the key issues appears to be that the bidders in the proposed takeovers are companies that operate in environments where they can not be subject to similar bids themselves. This concept of 'globalism for you and protectionism for me' is a critical flaw in the current world economy and is an issue that is going to cause major problems in the near future. It has its counterpart in the attempt by various nations to rig the value of their currencies in support of a mercantilist trading policies. This has led to the world's trading and financial systems getting so seriously out of kilter that there is a good chance that there is going to be a major economic crash. If you want to ponder how the current system might fall apart then you could do worse than read the following article on the carry trade

http://tinyurl.com/zondz

The type of instability that this activity is capable of generating was shown this week by the turmoil surrounding the Icelandic krona which at one stage caused the currency to devalue by more than 9% and threatened to spill over onto other currencies and markets.

http://news.ft.com/cms/s/70f34440-a5a4-11da-bf34-0000779e2340.html

The carry trade is the single biggest reason why the UK and the USA have been able to support the amazing inflation in the price of assets such as houses when their domestic savings rates have been so pathetically low. Unfortunately, when this flow of cash is cut off then the British, the American and ultimately the world economy are going to collapse very fast and very hard. When millions are on the dole then you can be sure that there will be plenty of people screaming for protectionism and no shortage of politicians willing to answer their call.

PS - I would not claim to be an expert on the shipping industry but I do know enough about financial markets to be aware of the existence of the Baltic Dry Index and its significance as indicator of the general state of the world's economy. It is one measure I shall be watching keenly over the next 12 months.

[fedsron2us]

26. Looks like some US port workers are not crazy about the deal

http://www.delawareonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060225/NEWS/602250320/1006

[Briar]

27. The winds of insecurity

The Guardian comments on how this deal is hurting Bush:

The winds of insecurity

Leader


If the biggest political challenge facing the modern world is to ensure that the United States again forms part of an effective international consensus on issues like the Middle East, global warming and the rule of law - and it is - then it follows that anything which weakens the architect of US unilateralism ought to be good news. The current ferment on Capitol Hill over the sale of American ports to a state-run company from Dubai has certainly weakened George Bush. So does it follow that the president's likely defeat on the issue is an event to celebrate? Unfortunately, life is not so simple.

...

It now looks probable that Congress will scuttle the DP World deal next week. That would be another humiliation for an increasingly weakened president. But there is an awkward truth at the heart of this angry Washington storm. That truth is that Mr Bush, not Congress, is right about the takeover. Dubai is a wealthy, stable and autocratic sheikhdom, a Singapore of the Gulf. The threat to American security from its takeover of a few US ports is negligible. The forces driving the resistance to DP World are ugly and will not help the cause of reintegrating the US with the global consensus. But, as Edwardian Britain found out, the biggest beneficiary of global free trade can also turn into a ferocious protectionist when the winds of insecurity start to blow.

...http://www.guardian.co.uk/leaders/story/0,,1726473,00.html

How ironic that the toxic islamophobia that Bush nurtured for his own ends may now help to destroy him. Along with much else.

[muriel_volestrangler]

28. Do you think that if we posted this in the Editorials forum

DUers would stop reading The Guardian? :evilgrin:

[Briar]

29. Indubitably

while claiming that they are not islamophobes, of course...

Interesting article here (posted on LBN), by the way:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/08/AR2006030802221_2.html

[FBBulldog]

30. couldn't resist...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x195824

[Briar]

31. I couldn't resist either...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x195828

[Taxloss]

32. 2 votes for greatest page.

I wonder who supplied the other one. ;)

[tjwmason]

33. Looks like 3 now.

Shocking really. :evilgrin:

[Monkey see Monkey Do]

34. Shocking indeed - it's topping the greatest page!

[T_i_B]

35. Looks like you have found a right old eejit

on Briar's thread Taxloss. Very angry, and doing all he or she can to avoid giving stright answers to your questions.

[Taxloss]

36. It was fun until I got bored.

At least those reading our exchange can see what I meant.