What do you do with toddlers in the evening on holiday?
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I think you might mean 'repossession' rather than 'reprocessing'. -
I think this is a bit of a myth. It's true that some of the current owners are pension funds (chiefly the Ontario Universities') but they're global outfits, big enough to know what they're about. As for ordinary UK pension funds, they mostly invest in publicly-tradeable stocks, which Thames no longer is (it's a private limited company, not a PLC), so even those that lazily track the markets by buying everything in the index won't be exposed as Thames isn't in any index. In other words, it's a lot less complicated than Thames, the Government or innumerable consultancies and PR outfits would like you to believe. In case, incidentally, the idea of a cooperative offends any delicate Thatcherite sensibilities, I'd argue that it fits the Thatcherite vision of a stakeholding democracy much better than selling tradeable shares to the public very cheaply. The public, despite their blessable cottons, are too easily tempted by the small but easy win (which is how they sold off their own building societies, preparing the ground for the credit crunch and then the crash) and, as became obvious after every privatisation before or since, their modest stakes inevitably end up in the hands of financial engineers whose only priority is to siphon off the assets and leave the husk to either go bankrupt or get "rescued" by the taxpayers (who thus get to pay twice for nothing). The root of that is the concept of "limited liability" which makes it all possible, but even the most nauseating free-market optimist would struggle to predict the demise of that. -
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