BT Chief To Become British Government Minister

judgecorp writes "BT chief Ian Livingston is leaving the British telecom provider to become a government minister. The executive has been appointed a seat in the House of Lords, which enables him to become Minister for Trade and Investment without having to be elected as a Member of the lower house of Parliament. Livingston has seen BT go from a £134 million loss in 2008 when he was appointed, to a profit of £2.5 billion in 2012. It still has a monopoly over certain sectors of the British telecom market, and has won all the contracts so far for rolling out broadband to rural areas."

Re:What an absolute c--t..

[klapaucjusz]

As a dual British citizen, I can only say this:

his appointment to the House of Lords is a strong argument in favour of getting rid of the undemocratic House of Lords, or at least making it an elected body.

So you say that only professional politicians should be able to hold government positions?

For anyone who's lost -- the United Kingdom has this strange political system where you need to be a member of the legislative branch in order to serve on the national executive: only members of parliament can be ministers of Her Majesty's government. This would appear to imply that it is impossible to appoint a specialist as minister, since only professional politicians have a chance to be elected to parliament; in practice, appointment to the Lords is used as a workaround.

BT's profits next year...

[CaptainOfSpray]

...will include several hundred million GBP that they will get for selling off land around the Adastral Park "Research" site. That's land that was compulsorily purchased for an RAF airfeld, which was ultimately "given" to BT. So it's taxpayer's land. BT has been leaning on the local council to rewrite their land use policies to allow the farmland to be built on. They intend to build a new town of 2000 homes right next to a European Special Protection Area that is also an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (think National Park, without the planning restrictions).

The land value will go from 6,000 GBP per acre to at least 500,000 per acre when BT get planning permission. And the worst bit is that this kind of house building is exactly what the district does NOT need - we need new housing in all the scattered villages where low-income people live and work, instead of in one place where are no jobs.

Please can we stop tarmacing over the entire f**king world?