Government on a loser for going ahead with RM privatisation

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Government on a loser for going ahead with Royal Mail privatisation

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If Royal Mail flounders, the Government’s opponents will attack it for letting a national asset be mismanaged by the private sector.
If it’s a success, the Government will come under fire for letting go of a national asset.

Margaret Thatcher thought privatising Royal Mail a step too far. She was ‘not prepared to have the Queen’s head privatised’.

Vince Cable, the Lib Dem Business Secretary, noted that the float would ensure the ‘long-term sustainability of the six days a week, one-price-goes-anywhere universal postal service’. This was presumably to allay the public’s concerns to the contrary. His Tory colleague Michael Fallon, says that’s guaranteed by Act of Parliament anyway – which makes one wonder if Cable doth protest too much, perhaps.

Moya Greene, the Canadian chief executive of Royal Mail, was paid £1.47  million in the last financial year. She returned £120,000 in housing allowance after criticism from Cable. She then hit out at the ‘hopelessly broken’ pay deal system for taxpayer-backed firms.
If Royal Mail is privatised then the board must run it as it sees fit without undue interference from a minority shareholder.
But if they run the company badly, including rewarding themselves unduly – and the history of privatised utilities suggests this is not unlikely – the Government will be pilloried for not doing enough to keep it in line.

Not so long ago it was claimed that the number of Elvis impersonators in Britain was rising so fast that they would account for a third of all new jobs by the end of the decade.

One feels almost the same about estate agents – who now account for almost one in four of all new jobs created in the past year, according to the Office for National Statistics.

Nothing better illustrates the disproportionate nature of our apparent economic recovery than our obsession with buying houses and getting on the property ladder. But this time it is all backed by the Government’s Funding for Lending and Help to Buy schemes.
Though there is finally some tentative good news on exports, which we report (opposite page), when even the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors urges the Bank of England to limit house price inflation, surely our new ‘rock star’ Governor Mark Carney really ought to pay attention.

Tweets are supposed to be short and sweet, so here goes. Twitter set for $10 billion flotation. Revenue might be $583 million. Or might not. Profit might be something or nothing. Go figure.