User:Varavour/Political positions of Bill Portland

Economic policy

Portland, who has long expressed concern over the “excesses” of Thatcherism, has widely been viewed as taking a more centrist stance on economic issues than other Conservatives. An Independent article in 2012 observed that “while he has generally been moderate with his criticism, lest his stridency do harm to his political future,” Portland “has for two decades consistently shown scepticism of policies justified in the name of the ‘market’.”

Privatisation

Portland’s most significant breaks with Conservative policy have generally been regarding

In 1999, after his party had lost power, and shortly before ceasing to be a member of the Lords, he said that “fire-sale privatisations” had largely negated the impact of Thatcher’s labour reforms, as they resulted in firms being “sold-off, stripped, and, in the end, shuttered entirely”, an outcome “no better than if the unions had been let to continue driving them into the ground,” and that the low price for which nationalised firms had been sold had only encouraged exploitative asset stripping rather than investment.

He has also questioned outsourcing practices, arguing that while “until recently, would-be foreign competitors had to acquire technical know-how,” the directors of outsourcing firms now “saw fit to pay them for the privilege”, for a while “satisfied to collect a slightly higher profit,” until invariably being surprised when their partners “discovered some improvement and realised they no longer had any need for their Western middlemen.”

In 2005, lamenting the purchase of P&O by Maersk, Portland said that the United Kingdom had ceased to be involved “in almost every major industrial sector,” an outcome which he claimed was “entirely avoidable” and “virtually without parallel” elsewhere in Europe. He has also has said that revenues from North Sea oil should have been used to invest in the modernisation of state-owned firms in so that they “would have been able to compete in the open market” after privatisation, decrying what he saw as the revenues’ having been wasted on “funding benefits for an entire sector of the population which now seems unlikely to ever return to productive employment”, although noting that the government “was not left with much choice” in the matter.

While in Cabinet, Portland opposed efforts to privatise Royal Mail, joining with members of the traditionally pro-privatisation Bow Group to successfully prevent a proposed partial privatisation backed by the Conservatives’ Liberal Democrat coalition partners, saying that even Thatcher had “drawn the line at ‘privatising the Queen’s head’”, and that the proposal was deeply unpopular amongst the general public.

Upon becoming Prime Minister, Portland announced that the proposed Royal Mail privatisation would be shelved; he also scrapped an almost-completed deal to sell the

Trade and foreign investment

Despite his scepticism of privatisation, and the long Tory tradition in favour of protectionist policies (e.g., the

Portland strongly supports the finalisation of the EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), and the proposed EU-US Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, and has claimed that the failure of the European Union to conclude those and other free trade agreements contributed to British dissatisfaction with the organisation. Portland has previously called for new free trade agreements between the EU and India, Australia and New Zealand, the Southern African Customs Union, and other members of the Commonwealth, and has argued that free trade agreements with emerging economies in Africa and Asia would benefit their development and reduce income inequality. In a 2014 New Statesman editorial he said it was time for Western nations to embrace the developing world's call for "trade, not aid".

Following the