THE Tories have always boasted that privatisation of major industries has been good for the economy and good for Britain. A rain-check on the history of Thatcher’s mass programme of privatisation now suggests otherwise.

Who thinks the privatisation of energy, or of water, or of telecoms — or, more recently, of Royal Mail — has been a roaring success either for the economy or for consumers, as opposed to an opportunity for exploitation and a rip-off for customers?

Much less mentioned, but equally — if not more — significant, is what has happened to the privatised car industry.

It still suffers from a massive trade deficit, with £48 billion of vehicles and parts imported last year — that is nearly half of Britain’s net manufacturing trade deficit — with profits and control lost abroad probably for ever. A worse deal than that is difficult to imagine.

Tony Blair’s support for privatisation allowed the former British Leyland to collapse in April 2005, leading to the loss of 10,000 jobs in and around the Longbridge plant near Birmingham and in effect to the demise of British car-making.

It is true that, under foreign ownership, production has risen from a low in 2009 of fewer than one million vehicles to more than 1.5m vehicles last year, 80 per cent of which were exported.

Sunderland now makes more cars than Italy. But the companies producing them are Indian, Japanese and German so that the British car industry now serves the interests of those countries not Britain.

Indeed, there have long been concerns about a hollowing out of the supply chain — the average local content of vehicles assembled in Britain is about a third, compared with about two-thirds in Germany.

In the past 20 years Britain has lost almost all its large top-tier suppliers. Dunlop, Lucas and Automotive Products have all but disappeared, leaving only GKN as a leader in power-train technology.

A classic example of what has been lost by Tory policy in treating world-class British companies as baubles for sale in the international market to the highest buyer, irrespective of the loss to the British economy, concerns the electric supercharger.

It was conceived in Essex and is British innovation at its best. It will soon find its way into top-end cars. Sadly it is now French.

Valeo, the French automotive supplier, bought the technology from Controlled Power Technologies in Basildon in 2011. This e-supercharger is just the last in a long line of once world-leading British inventions, but because the industrial structure into which it needs to be fitted has been sold off, it ends up in foreign hands to the permanent disadvantage of Britain.

What is needed is builders of long-term industrial market share (Labour), not get-rich-quick barrow-boy salesmen (Tories).

• JUST as the Blairite official infamously emailed on the day of the September 11 terrorist attacks: “This is a good day to bury bad news stories,” so the Tory government took advantage of the last day of Parliament to launch a similar device to slip through a deeply unpopular measure they would never have dared put to Parliament when it was in full session.

It enables the government itself to decide where nuclear storage dumps will be located however much local inhabitants or pressure groups may object or demonstrate.

Previously this was decided on the basis of consent, now it will be settled on the fiat of a government minister.

The Tories have taken it upon themselves to bypass local planning procedures in order to enforce the burial of 4.5 million cubic metres of radioactive waste which has remained unburied for 50 years because no local population wanted it near them, even if they were bribed to take it.

The alternative to ramming nuclear dumps down the nation’s throat is of course to speed up the dissemination of renewable energy.

But the Tory Party in particular, as well as too many Labour MPs, remain strongly attached to nuclear irrespective of the storage problems. Perhaps the new law overriding local opposition will itself generate a new level of resistance, as fracking has, which is politically untenable.

Significantly, Radiation Free Lakeland stopped Copeland Borough Council from setting up a nuclear dump near Sellafield on the grounds that there was no evidence that deep storage was safe and that the Cumbrian geology was unsuitable compared to, say, East Anglia (but that of course is strong Tory territory).

Maybe also it will make a difference when people realise that storing nuclear waste costs taxpayers £2bn a year. When did we ever agree to that?

• Michael Meacher is incumbent Labour MP for Oldham West and Royton.