Free internet for UK households if Labour win UK election

LABOUR leader Jeremy Corbyn has announced that if his party wins the General Election, he will take action to nationalise the fixed-line internet network owned by BT.

This would then allow high quality broadband to be given free of charge to all of those in the UK who have internet access and would save the average household about £30 (€35) a month in rental fees.

He would finance this by increasing taxes to multi-national brands such as Facebook, Google and Microsoft who operate in the UK but don’t, in his party’s opinion, contribute sufficiently to the British economy.

The amount that the Labour Party expects to be needed to fund this operation is £20 billion (€23 billion) although industry insiders suggest that it would be more likely to cost as much as £100 billion (€115 billion).

Such a decision would obviously affect the profits and turnover of all of those companies in the UK currently offering internet services and one in particular, Talk Talk, was surprised by this unexpected news as it was in the process of reaching a deal to sell its Fibre Nation business.

This enterprise was aimed at supplying very high speed connections in northern England to some 60,000 households initially, with the plan to expand this to take in some 3 million private customers.

Whilst Talk Talk has so far invested around £60 million (€69 million) in developing this project, other suppliers have also been putting money into their own alternatives and any new Labour government would have to negotiate with them all.