'Don't sell family silver to foreigners'

This is apropos a Business Recorder op-ed "Don't sell family silver to foreigners" carried by the newspaper yesterday. The writer, M Ziauddin, who is a senior economic journalist, has presented a strong case of what the title of his article says: Don't sell family silver to foreigners. In order to substantiate the argument, the writer made several points; and one of which is the book of Kenneth Surin's Ukania's Great Privatisation Heist.

Regardless of the merits of his argument through which he has sought to denigrate the then UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher, I would like to invite the attention of both M Ziauddin and Kenneth Surin to the fact that Mrs Thatcher's success in constructing an authoritarian populist project was largely due to the fact that Labour party had failed to articulate a counter narrative to effectively challenge her "great British share-owning democracy" approach to UK's economy. Privatisation was one of the key changes that she introduced to her country. In my view, it would be unfair to ignore the fact that privatisation, accompanied by deregulation, helped her nation steadily move towards a truly free market economy. Insofar as Pakistan is concerned, this South Asian nation's experiences in relation to privatisation are vastly different from the Thatcher era UK's.