The Cadbury Takeover

Cadbury is a nearly 200-year-old British confectionary, an English institution of chocolate dating back to 1824. Like baked beans, financial services and the BBC, Cadbury is important to the British as both a institutional symbol of national identity and a generator of jobs and commerce. It's thus understandable that the British people where a little concerned last week when Kraft, the American behemoth and second largest food and beverage company in the world agreed to buy Cadbury for 11.9 billion pounds.

The acquisition has grabbed a great deal of attention and has lead many Brits to ponder, in a helpless, pub stool complaining kind of way just what the ramifications of their nation's inviting policy towards foreign takeovers might be.

Since the early 1980s, when Margret Thatcher removed huge swaths of legal barriers to foreign ownership of British companies, the list of businesses the United Kingdom can call its own is dwindling. The Empire no longer houses a single major auto maker and most of London's investment banks are foreign owned. England's steel, chemical, water and electricity industries are also foreign owned and most of the nation's ports and airports are controlled from abroad.

Unlike the United Kingdom, the government's of most European countries tend to block foreign takeovers as a protectionist measure for the job security of their citizens. In the United States, where an emphasis on the efficiency of free markets reigns, the government barres whole sectors of the economy from foreign takeovers. Even in capital hungry countries like China and India, strict regulations are put on investment and ownership from abroad.

The irony is if Britain, a nation clinging to its heyday more desperately than any country in the world, doesn't fix Thatcher's mistake, the Empire will be sold piece by piece to countries it remembers well.