There's a difference between selling something and destroying it

So Dear Old Brum has gone bust. At which point there are those crying out that the assets must not be sold:

“As the process of balancing the council’s books begins, local communities are rightly concerned about the fate of publicly owned historic places and buildings and arts and culture venues,” the letter states. “Birmingham’s financial reconstruction must not come at the cost of its priceless heritage.”

The letter lists sites including the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Aston Hall, Moseley Road Baths, Symphony Hall and Cannon Hill Park as “precious, publicly owned places” that should be saved.

Neil Mendoza, the chair of Historic England, said: “Cultural and heritage assets are incredibly precious and important parts of communities. They’re not things to be bought and sold.

“This is a serious situation, and heritage and community considerations need to be taken into account as well as the obvious legal ones. People in Birmingham are really upset at the idea these things might even be considered as assets to be sold.”

They are assets and it should be considered, that sale of them. It’s entirely possible that the sale doesn’t make sense, just as it is possible it does.

But the point we want to emphasise, insist upon, is that selling an asset does not mean destroying that asset. That, say, Moseley Road Baths is privately, not council, owned does not make Moseley Road Baths disappear. It just changes who owns the place.

This is, to us, part of a larger mistake more generally made. We often hear of demands to “save an iconic company” when what is meant is to save the particular and current legal form of it. The underlying economic asserts do not cease to exist if a particular legal wrapper goes bust. What changes in bankruptcy is who owns those assets, not the existence of the assets themselves.

That is, don’t get hung up on the legal or form of ownership. The things themselves, sure, they might well be worth saving. Or not, as the case might be. But the form of ownership, or even who owns, isn’t the thing that must necessarily be preserved. That’s to reify the current legal arrangement which is an absurdity. Even if we do want to save the thing itself it’s the thing that is to be considered, not the who or how.