Mont Pelerin plans go under ground

Some years ago we picked up an article from one of the London
papers which told of a group called the Mont Pelerin Society operating out of
London which, using the ideas of one Adam Smith, an old free market economist
from Scotland, was responsible for foisting its ideas upon the whole world
community.

The first country to pick it up in a big way was New Zealand,
under a system called Rogernomics.

This has proved to be a gigantic failure and all the promises
that were made about light at the end of the tunnel never came to fruition.

We looked up the internet on the Mont Pelerin Society and saw
that some years ago they had planned to privatise the London Underground, and
now at last, here it is in our newspapers.

We quote from Business Day, 31 July 2001: "Court
supports plan for London underground -– England's high court backed a
government plan to partially privatise London's underground railway network
yesterday, despite concern that the proposal could undermine safety..."

Then, travelling through Singapore recently, on 31 July 2001,
I picked up a copy of the International Herald Tribune and saw a headline
"London Tube Has Yankee Who Won't Go Home -– The tourism-minded British
government customarily offers American visitors a warm reception. But all it has
shown Robert Kiley, the American mass transit expert hired by London's mayor
to restore its crumbling subway system, is a cold shoulder...

What is at issue is a complex $18.5 billion partial
privatisation arrangement that the government wants to put in place. The
plan, which had little input from people experienced in running trains, was put
forward by the British Treasury and its powerful chief, the chancellor of the
exchequer, Gordon Brown, as a way of transferring risk from the public purse to
the private sector.

The government already eyed Mr Kiley suspiciously on his
arrival last fall because his sponsor, Mr Livingstone, is a reviled figure at 10
Downing Street...

Mr Kiley, 65, is credited with rescuing rapid transit
networks in Boston and New York and he consequently was a popular choice among
Londoners, who put the dilapidated state of their once-celebrated Tube at the
top of their lists of complaints about their congested city.

The government plan would transfer tracks, signals and
stations to three privately owned companies on 30-year contracts while leaving
operation of the trains to the publicly run London Underground.

Mr Kiley bluntly pronounced the arrangement 'fatally flawed'
and 'dumb' and said it would compromise safety -– a loaded charge in
Britain, which has experienced a series of fatal rail crashes in recent years.

Mr Kiley said the government proposal would replicate the
fragmented structure of the privatised British rail system, which is notorious
with the British public as the most expensive, hazardous and inefficient in
Europe. He proposed a substitute that he said would save money and speed
improvement through a unified management structure. He said such a structure was
the norm in all successful transit systems and necessary for guaranteeing safety...

On July 18, Mr Kiley was scheduled to give the government the
results of two consultants' studies that called into serious question the
financing and the safety guarantees of its plan. But before he could do so, Mr
Blair ousted him and obtained a court gag order to keep him from going public
with the findings...

The stated purpose of Mr Blair's first term was to cede
power to local decision-makers, as shown in the 'devolution' project that
created legislatures in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland and the first
elected mayor of London. The battle of the Tube puts in question whether the
government will be willing to cede any more powers.

Mr Livingstone's campaign for mayor was based on his
opposition to the government's Tube privatisation plan and he beat the Labour
candidate supporting it by a 3-to-1 margin...

Mr Kiley said that, win or lose, he was staying." (emphases
added).

All airports must be sold, all ports must be sold; roads,
services and anything that could be a revenue collector for the national
governments must go to overseas people. This will leave each of these
governments powerless as they will have no machinery to operate with and a
global government will become the only answer.

Praise God for the Bible and the wisdom that God gives us to
understand these things. We are living indeed in the last days and there is only
one place of safety, that is the spiritual place in the hands of our Lord Jesus
Christ, who gave Himself for us that we might live unto Him.