Privatisation: why take money off the taxpayer when entrepre

[TrueBlueTerrier]

Royal Mail privatisation: why take money off the taxpayer when entrepreneurs are willing to put up the cash?

Douglas Carswell
Douglas Carswell was first elected to Parliament in 2005 by a slender 920 votes. He was returned as MP for Clacton in 2010 with a 12,000 majority. He is the author of The End of Politics and the Birth of iDemocracy and believes that the internet is making the world a vastly better place.

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How many letters did you get last week? I bet you received fewer than you would have done five years ago.

Why? Like it or not, we are choosing to email each other when previously we wrote. Even the number of bills and bank statements sent through the post is falling, as people do more business online.

Since 2006 – around about the time we started to get broadband – the number of letters we send has fallen by 30 per cent. It was down 8 per cent last year alone.

But it’s not all doom and gloom.

If online means fewer letters, it has caused a massive increase in the number of small parcels we send one another. Think of all those Amazon and eBay purchases needing to be delivered each day.

The problem for Royal Mail is that their business model needs to adapt to these changes. Letter-sorting might be much more automated, but they are still sorting parcels much the way that the Victorians did. They need more high-tech sorting kit to deal with parcels, the way that UPS and DHL do.

Royal Mail also means much more customer-focused, with fewer lengthy waits in collection depots. And a way of ensuring that the customer isn’t made to feel bad when they finally get to the head of the queue because they failed to bring enough utility bills to prove who they are.

Adapting Royal Mail means spending money. The question is whose money? Money from the taxpayer or from private investors?
We were wrong to bail out the banks with taxpayers' money – and some of us said so at the time. It would be similarly wrong to put taxpayers' money into Royal Mail.

Why should older folk in my constituency, struggling to make ends meet, be forced to pay higher taxes when there are private investors willing to spend their own money on upgrading Royal Mail?

“It’s a public service,” shriek the unions.

Of course the unions oppose the move. It’s what unions do. But if we ran telephones as a public service, I suspect we’d have waiting lists for mobile phones, and weekly text rations. “You need to book three days in advance for a Skype call, sir.”
What is virtuous about taking money off the taxpayer to upgrade Royal Mail when there are people perfectly willing to put their own money into it?

“But they’ll insist on owning the business – and taking a profit,” shriek the Lefties.
At least there would be a profit. Under the proposals, those that work for Royal Mail would be able to buy a share of it, like John Lewis does.

If government invested money in Royal Mail, they too would insist on owning it – but we just wouldn’t ever see anything in return.
Who, ultimately, would be the more careful owner? A Whitehall-based organisation that has failed to balance even its own budget for a generation? Or the sort of entrepreneurs that have given us DHL and Amazon?
Goodness knows I have voted against the Government on all manner of things. But on this they are doing exactly the right thing – and they deserve our full backing.

[fishtank]

There are so many holes in this argument that I don't have the time or the inclination to bother with it.
I'll just sum up.
It's poorly researched,ideological bollocks.

[TrueBlueTerrier]

This is the same bloke who made so much noise about getting anti cards from dead people.

[UnhappyGremlin]

TBH, I couldn't be arsed to read the whole thing, I figured it was bollocks after the first few lines.

So, I'll just agree with FT and Teebs.