No problem, and I appreciate you may not have seen what happened. Brown raided pension funds which caused the collapse of final salary pensions. I was a Director within a very large Telecomms company, with the usual benefits of large salary, LTIP’s, and with hundreds of thousands of shares. Brown then decided to extract money from BT and other telecom providers by having an auction for 3G licences which reached about 20Bn. This of course meant that our customers, BT etc, stopped purchasing equipment which we provided while they replenished their cash. The net result was that the U.K. telecommunications manufacturers had to lay off tens of thousands of jobs both in the U.K. and USA, such that eventually the provision of equipment was given to China and Huawei, the U.K. Telecomms industry effectively died. Pensions were lost, pensions based on shares both in the U.K. and USA (via 407K) disappeared almost overnight. It was a complete shambles and cost the jobs and future pensions of tens of thousands of people lost their pensions and expected savings with shares. I don’t mean this as any sort of political statement, but that man single handedly ruined a profitable high technology company and basically gave it to the Chinese…..
