Gordon Brown reveals £16bn Assets Sale

Today Gordon Brown has announced a £16bn sale of government assets to attempt to reduce the budget deficit. The cross-Channel rail link, the Dartford crossing and the Tote bookmakers will all be sold to private companies over the next two years.

Britain’s 33% share in Urenco, which provides uranium enrichment equipment, will also be put up for sale.

Huge parcels of land will also be sold -the government currently owns more than £220bn worth of land at todays valuation.

Gordon Brown pointed out:

“growth of overall spending” must be reduced after April 2011, by “cutting back on low-priority programmes, increasing efficiency and productivity and unwinding the programmes that have been put in place to support demand over the last year”.

The Conservatives leader David Cameron was quoted as saying:

“we’ve still got to get to grips with public spending, get to grips with the deficit – and we must make sure we get good value for money.

Let’s not forget, this is the prime minister who sold our gold reserves and if he’d sold them later he could have got four times the quantity. So, let’s not have any more incompetence from him.”