Who Runs Britain?: How the Super-Rich are Changing our Lives: How the Super-rich Are Changing Our Lives |
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Robert Peston
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Pages: 352 (Hardcover)
ISBN: 0340839422
Pub: Hodder & Stoughton General
Pub date: 2008-02-07
Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 2025
Reader Reviews:
AN INADEQUATE ANALYSIS (2/3 people found this helpful)
The Guardian in its 'Digested Reads', reviewed this book in the form of an interview between the author and Jeremy Paxman.
In reply to Paxman's suggestions that the book had little substance, Robert Peston was reduced to protesting 'I know a lot about Allan Leighton and the Post Office'.
Unfortunately even this is not true.
The chapter on Leighton and Royal Mail is a shoddy one.
Peston admits that Leighton's grand scheme to save £350 million by ending the second delivery achieved next to nothing. At this point an enquiring journalist would set out to find out why Leighton's promise had proved to be empty. It would not have been hard. Tens of thousands of posties could have told him. The second delivery had almost disappeared already in a death of a thousand cuts and axing it was bound to save little.
Sadly, Peston failed to do the leg work.
In a newpaper article that might have been excusable but not in a book.
His assumption that privatization would have been the way forward is never properly justified. It does not occur to him that Margaret Thatcher decided not to privatize Royal Mail and British Rail for sound reasons.
There is also the question of why is there a chapter on Royal Mail in a book called 'Who Runs Britain ?'. Its inclusion is the strangest since Edward Gibbon's decision to include a chapter on Manchester United in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
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Books -> Refinements -> Language (feature_browse-bin) -> English
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Books -> Refinements -> Format (binding_browse-bin) -> Hardcover