The Guardian article to which Barry kindly provided a link has another link at the end to an article entitled "The coalition holds Britain's cultural fabric in contempt":
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/01/big-society-free-market-neoliberalism?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487
This article may provide a clue as to why the privatisation issue is dragging on so interminably. It was written the day before the debate on the future of the Forestry Commission and we all know what happened there. The nation rose as one to demand that our forests remained in national ownership. Could it be that the government is concerned that acceding to privatisation may elicit a similar vociferous backlash resulting in yet another embarassing U-turn?
If they are clued-up then they will know that in both the last general elections the people of Dover voted overwhelmingly to have Dover remain as a Trust Port and that Charlie Elphicke campaigned on that very platform in the certain knowledge that he would not get elected if he showed his true colours and opposed it.
It was only after the election that he suddenly came up with a fully fledged privatisation plan. Little by little we found out that the plan had in fact been conceived by Neil Wiggins whose company IVOPS specialises in offering advice on port operations and that the Peoples Port was in fact WigginsPort embellished with carrots to tempt the downtrodden denizens of Dover.
Will the government plump for WigginsPort or will it go for the professional DHB plan or for another as yet unknown, or will it play safe and retain the port as a Trust Port? They will know that the latter is unquestionably the best option for the port itself, with all revenues reinvested in the port. They will also know that the other main candidate for privatisation, the major oil and gas energy hub of Milford Haven, long ago let it be known that it wished to retain Trust Port status.