Not Tax and Spend - Simply sell off and spend.

Tucked away in Gordon Brown's Christmas Cracker Speech (Full text at BBC)

Sir Michael Lyons is also setting out today departmental guidelines for the disposal by 2010 of £30 billions of public assets.(5% of the national asset base)

Harold Macmillan at a dinner of the Tory Reform Group at the Carlton Club on November 8 1985) characterised the sale of nationalised industries by Margaret Thatcher anecdotally, as ..."selling off the family silver" ....

"First of all the Georgian silver goes. And then all that nice furniture that used to be in the saloon. Then the Canalettos go." Profitable parts of the steel industry and the railways had been privatised, along with British Telecom: "They were like two Rembrandts still left."

Macmillan's speech was much commented on and described in journalistic shorthand as "selling off the family silver".

As the old rogue was to explain later to the House of Lords, he merely .. " ...ventured to question (that the Gubment) was the using these huge sums as if they were income."

Which is of course, exactly what Gordon Brown intends to do.

PS. The £20Bn to be raised by flogging off whatever they can find in the national attics and basements, is roughly equivalent (no-one knows the exact figure) to the total recent VAT carousel frauds have removed from the Exchequer in the last 4 years - which continues at £400Mn per month (at least) and about which a report was promised in the statement yesterday by the Chancellor - but curiously was missing. See latest report on MITAC fraud from Nat Stat office here. Warning PDF and also not for taxpayers of a nervous disposition.

FOOTNOTES on Flogging off the Queen's realm and Public property...

The Ministry of Defence has received on average over £200m annually from disposals. Property surplus to the requirements of the National Health Service has in recent years been passed to NHS Estates for disposal.This realised £1.5 Bn. in the four years to 2000, and substantial receipts since then. The Department for Transport and the Department for Constitutional Affairs have also disposed of assets in this period.

As the National Trust says in a discussion paper on the question of sales of Heritage Assets...

"The arrangements therefore set up a tension between revenue maximisation and the protection of heritage interests which can be difficult to resolve, place heritage in opposition to the public body’s financial objectives, and portray heritage as a problem rather than an opportunity."

Picture of the West Front at Erddig Hall, Wrexham which is threatened with being sold off for development - it was voted Britains second finest in the Channel 5 Television series "Britains Finest". The National Trust (op cit) says Information on the purchasers of heritage assets disposed of by Government Departments proved difficult to obtain on a systematic basis, but from local government the surveys found that 43 out of
66 named assets went to the private sector, mainly commercial bodies and developers.

You can examine the complete English Heritage list of Buildings at Risk here.Nationally 1,430 items - 3.4% of Grade 1 and 2 listed Buildings are at risk through neglect or decay and developers. Unlike England there is no advice or policy in Wales or Northern Ireland on the disposal of heritage assets either by government bodies or by local authorities.