LONDON: Britain is being sold off at a rate unprecedented in modern times. If the foreign takeover bids announced or hinted at over the past few months all go through, airports, ships, banks, gas pipelines, stock exchanges, chemical plants and glass factories will fall into foreign ownership. Yet there is no debate; scarcely an eyebrow is raised. In any other country, there would be uproar. Maybe that’s a sign that Britain is more grown up than other countries about foreign ownership; maybe it’s because we’re culturally more open; maybe it’s because we are more decadent. None the less, with this rate of takeover, within a generation, most British workers outside the public sector will be working for foreign companies. And ownership does matter.

The scale of what is happening is truly breathtaking compared with even five years ago. P&O, a great shipping company with an unparalleled infrastructure of container ports and ships, is being pursued by Dubai Ports. British Airports Authority has been put on notice to expect a bid from the Spanish. The London Stock Exchange is in the play. A British bank, with its huge network of banks in Asia built up over more than 100 years, anticipates a bid from an American bank; Centrica, supplier of gas to 13 million homes, is coveted by Mr Putin’s state gas company, Gazprom. BOC, key manufacturer of industrial gases, is being bid for by a German chemical company; Pilkington, our last, great, independent glass company, is under the hammer to Japan’s Nippon Sheet Glass. Cumulative price tag? £60bn.

It is not totally one-way traffic — we buy companies in other countries — but no other economy is as open as ours and takeovers so easy. And, apart from the US, no other economy needs the inflow of overseas cash so acutely.

The tragedy is that foreigners want to pay fancy prices for our companies because they see them as building blocks for their own ambitions and commercial dreams. Dubai wants to be the third largest port operator in the world; the Spanish want to be international airport operators... and so on. British staff, British assets and British brands, built up over decades, are to become part of somebody else’s story. And nobody gives a damn.

To complain is to be cast as a protectionist and not to see that companies are just bargain lots, in effect to be on permanent auction. But companies are more than that. They are communities of human beings with a shared purpose; that’s why they tick.

Some 20 years ago, the Royal Bank of Scotland fought off a foreign takeover and argued that it would be good for Scotland and Edinburgh to be the home of an independent bank, complete with a Scottish headquarters, rather than become part of another company’s and country’s dream. It was right; it has grown into one of the world’s great banks.

Instead of being a regional office of an American bank, its head office in Edinburgh entrenches the city as Scotland’s capital and financial centre. As a result, there are jobs, careers, skills and the opportunity to make fortunes that compare with the world’s best, with all that means not just for ambitious bankers but for the city’s law firms, accountants, university and civil servants. More importantly, it keeps alive an idea of Scotland and Edinburgh as one of the world’s financial playmakers rather than a subcontractor. That matters to everyone’s sense of themselves; Edinburgh counts.—Dawn/The Observer News Service