German buses are not the same as American chocolate
Arriva Plc (LON:ARI) is a bus company, so there is no problem in it being bought by the Germans.
It is not an important or strategic business like a chocolate manufacturer, so business secretary Lord Mandelson will have no reason to invoke his proposed Cadbury’s Law to ensure Arriva remains British.
Kraft must wonder where it went wrong. Is it because it is American whereas Deutsche Bahn is a fellow member of the European Union? Is it because it paid £11bn when the German rail company is offering only £1.5bn for Arriva? It cannot be because the US food company that acquired Cadbury is “big business” – Deutsche Bahn employs almost 250,000 people, making it twice the size of the British armed forces.
But after the Cadbury episode, the Arriva bid demonstrates that the international trade in companies is back to business as usual. As it ought to be. In this case it is another UK company being bought by an overseas buyer but at other parts in the cycle it has been UK firms doing the buying.
Indeed, bus and rail companies have been particularly active in overseas expansion. Arriva bought its way into Denmark in 1997 and has since acquired operations in Sweden, the Netherlands, Hungary, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Slovenia and the Czech republic – as well as Germany. Its rivals at Stagecoach are big in America; National Express’s main shareholders are Spanish.
This is an international business: Deutsche Bahn already owns Chiltern Railways in this country and jointly operates the London Overground service.
If there is a difference between Arriva and Cadbury is may be that a transport company’s operations must be based in the same countries as the customers: they cannot be moved to America, or to Germany. Even so, a foreign owner could move the administration overseas, it could fail to invest in local markets and it could close routes that a UK owner would have retained.
It was Cadbury, not Kraft, however that moved production to Poland – where Arriva just happens already to operate the trains.
January 4th, 2011 at 12:04 pm
http://dofonline.co.uk
2 January 2010
FAO: LCC . 9 Madryn Street.
Rt Hn Grant Schapps
… Dear Sirs, and yet another Tory minister goes straight into the top ten team.
So Liverpool County Council, you want to pull down the birth place of yet another cultural icon of our times and it is only the intervention of the right man in the right place, at the right time, with the right convictions, and the right foresight to stand up and say, ‘ Hold on what do you think you are doing’ Yes, and that is the Right Honorable Member, Mr. Grant Schapps .
Well said Grant!
Years ago I was driving through Penn Hill on a cold September morning and as I was at the traffic lights a huge luxurious travelling German hotel on wheels pulled up next to me. The vehicle of what seemed at the time was something akin to an alien invader opened and a group of young Germans appeared from behind the blacked out windows and called out “John Lennon Strasse”
I returned .No Strasse just Mimi’s!
Dis is correct they chorused. Follow me I shouted and of I went off with this multi million dollar film convoy in tow.
To my disbelief when we all arrived in Panorama Rd I could not believe what I saw, the door from Mimi’s home had been removed and the bungalow where John Lennon had grown up had been torn down for a dull ‘Super New Development’!!! and the pale blue original door from the bungalow now sat outside another similar building further up the road.
I cannot even now begin to describe the rage that seared through me when I saw this cheap shoddy deceit, I was so ashamed of these new peoples that where moving in and taking over the Borough lock stock and heritage at that time, starting with a non elected civic directorate and their friends with their cheap bricks and heavy handed clout, changing everybodys lives to the point where even John’s memory was not sacred to them if anything apart from 4×4’s, free money, and power was.
So now I hear that even Liverpool’s County Council is trying to tear down 9 Madryn Street, the birthplace of Ringo Starr and only one man of note is standing up alone for our living heritage. Mr. Grant Schapps MP!
Now I feel at long last we have the right people in the right place and time to save what little is left of our living generations cultural history.
Well done Mr Schapps, well done Sir!
A final reference to these Boroughs, those coaches I mentioned were carrying thousands of pounds worth of revenue for the Carlton Hotel, in the middle of the week, and in a recession to boot, and that was when it was over 100 pounds a night for a room at the Carlton, not any more I hear now it’s fifty something, not to mention what they would have filmed and distributed would have been free advertising for the town, plus on this occasion for the right reasons.
Does anyone remember Bow and the Rachael Whitbread inverse house sculpture? A ground breaking concept in sculpture, and what did the civic authorities do with that rich cutting edge tourist attraction.
Yes. You got it, they, the so called civic authority tore it down on the very night the artist was awarded the Turner Prize for her work. And what happened next, nothing happened next except both tourist, art,and financial community turned their backs on Bow and it has never been mentioned in cultural dispatches since or will again for a very long time, you may as well change your name to WOB for all the interest you can conjure up now after that display of cultural vandalism.
Maybe there is a pattern emerging here that needs further study.
Living Heritage is such a subjective view with narrow parameters that its survival should not be left in the hands of those that could not even tell you how to spell Umber let alone identify it.
If Ringo’s place of birth, 9 Madryn St survives this attack from the developers wrecking ball then you can chalk that one up to a Tory minister, where all culture is safe and usually has been for centuries past.
Oh! and yes, the irony lets not forget the irony, always irony in deceit, once this young film director spotted that something was not as it should have been with John and Mimi’s home, maybe it was the fact I could not utter a word or perhaps it was the builder in his innocence calling out “ Mimi’s house is up the road now” that is when in his broken English he asked me which is the quickest way to Liverpool.
If I could have spoken I should have said straight up to Newbury > M4> M5 and look for the signs for John Lennon Airport. Then you know you are in Liverpool, the home of the Beatles.
Yrs
kk .