Compare and contrast...

Nobody bats an eyelid when BAA (including three Scottish airports) is sold off to the Spanish, as reported in The Guardian:

"The nation, it has to be said, is not in mourning for BAA. It is hard to imagine the French letting Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris to slip into foreign ownership, and impossible to think of JFK in New York or Los Angeles airport being out of American hands. But Heathrow and Gatwick? Nobody cares.
We're not even bothered whether the new owner is an indebted Spanish construction company, with a Canadian pension fund and the state of Singapore in tow, or a Wall Street investment bank and its friends."

But it is a different story when the French/Dutch stock exchange is bought over by New York, again reported in The Guardian:

"Jacques Chirac, the French president, threw a huge political spanner yesterday in the works of the agreed €8bn (£5.5bn) takeover of Euronext by the New York Stock Exchange by openly backing an all-European merger with Deutsche Börse instead.
The president's astonishing intervention, made at a Franco-German summit in Rheinsberg with a bemused chancellor Angela Merkel, reflects widespread concerns within France - home of the notion of economic "national champions" - about an American putsch on a key European financial market."

Don't ask me which attitude is healthier.

Update: Will Hutton has an idea or two (here):

"Ferrovial has borrowed £10 billion to make this bid, and the poor mites who are going to pay it back are you and me. The interest on the debt will be £600 million which will set against BAA's profits, thus lowering their tax contributions to the Treasury by around £250 million. That's a fair few roads, schools and hospitals that will not be built as a result. In order to find the wherewithal to repay the principal, Ferrovial will have to divert cash that would otherwise have been spent on improving our airports into debt service.
The notion that they are managerially so brilliant that they conjure up an extra £ 1 billion of free cash flow every year is for the birds. Only somebody who has run nothing - a city commentator, an investment banker, an official or a minister - could entertain the idea for a nanosecond. They will have to put up charges and lower wage rates and all the time British airports will become danker and more cesspit like than ever."