Selling Off Britain

I caught up on the Channel 4 program 'Selling Off Britain' the other evening (which can still be seen on 4OD for another 23 days) in which I expected a rational public to offer up or vote for at least a few solutions to help pay back our massive national debt.

I wasn't expecting a spectacular result, after all many people are still convinced of the need to spend like cash is going out of fashion and that the state needs to run our important services, but what I witnessed was a total fucking failure.

 The audience were offered the choice of selling off government owned assets (such as leases on service stations and empty, unused land) at a profit of £5Bn or "posh property"/perks offered to MPs, judges and foreign diplomats at a profit of £500M.  There where a host of other suggestions in the program and on an online survey too, which I was too late to participate in, but the audience failed to approve a single penny's worth!  The online participants were slightly more willing to address the problem and conjured up on average £20Bn worth of assets to sell, with a rather amazing 85% voting to sell off parts of the NHS.

But even this is a pretty trivial sum compared with the current total estimate of over £2.3Trillion worth of debt we need to repay or the addition of another £167.9 billion this year.  I cannot understand why are we so unwilling to deal with this growing problem and why an audience applying to appear on a show like this failed to vote for a single suggestion.  Are we really that attached to the idea that our Foreign Ministers and judges should be living it up in country mansions whilst the majority of us work 9-5 servicing a debt they racked up?