A right royal rip-off - What RM privatisation tells us about

[TrueBlueTerrier]

A right royal rip-off - What the Royal Mail privatisation tells us about modern Britain

http://rt.com/op-edge/uk-royal-mail-pri ... ction-073/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

It’s the wilful destruction of another much-loved British institution. The privatisation of the Royal Mail, the British postal service, brings to an end nearly five hundred years of history- stretching back the days of King Henry VIII.

By privatising the Royal Mail, our coalition government has shown that it does not care a jot for our national heritage, or the devastating impact the sell-off will have on remote rural communities, or how the elderly and the poor will be disproportionately affected. They have shown us that all they care about is rewarding their wealthy backers in the City of London and keeping in with the giants of global capitalism.

Even Mrs Thatcher, the Prime Minister who started the privatisation process in Britain in 1979 thought that selling the Royal Mail was a step too far. However the current UK government with its fanatical commitment to neo-liberalism is determined to take us to dark, scary places that even the Iron Lady shied away from.

The British public, who know only too well from first-hand experience that privatisation invariably means higher prices and worse services, was overwhelmingly opposed to the sale. An opinion poll in July revealed that 67% were against the privatisation, with 36% ‘strongly’ opposed. Just 4% were ’strongly’ in favour. 96% of Royal Mail employees were against the sale too. Yet despite this overwhelming public opposition, the government arrogantly pushed ahead with its plans, showing once again the contempt with which it regards the views of the majority. Ludicrously the sell-off has been hailed by Prime Minister David Cameron as ‘a piece of popular capitalism’. In fact, it’s a piece of highly unpopular capitalism, in which the public have lost out in a massive way.

Once again, an asset that we- the British people- owned has been flogged off way below its real value. The fact that shares leapt by as much as 38% on the first day of conditional trading, shows us how much the government undervalued the company.

For instance, the Royal Mail’s real estate was valued at just £787m-a laughable figure considering that it owns some prime sites in our major cities, including a depot in London estimated to be worth £1bn. The Royal Mail plans to reduce its number of sites from 45 to 37 by 2016, with the profits from property sales going to the new private owners. Meanwhile, as the private investors gorge on the profits, we - the taxpayers - have been left holding Royal Mail pension fund liabilities of around £37.5bn - a clear case of nationalising the losses and privatising the gains.

The pledge by the Business Secretary Vince Cable that only ‘responsible, long-term institutional investors’ would be permitted to buy Royal Mail shares is at variance with the news that hedge funds, the vilest manifestation of modern vulture capitalism, have been allowed to invest. It’s been reported that Lansdowne Partners, one of the world’s biggest hedge funds, had taken ‘a massive stake’ in Royal Mail. Lansdowne are not the only giant of global capitalism to benefit, for the lead adviser to the government on the sale was none other than the ’great vampire squid’ itself, Goldman Sachs. Overall, the government paid £21.7m in fees to ‘advisers’ for advice on selling a company which the owners - the British public - didn’t want sold.

Whichever way you look at it the sell-off represents a right royal rip-off for the British taxpayer. There’ll be further costs down the line too. On Wednesday, the Royal Mail admitted that more postal workers will lose their jobs following the sell-off. And although the universal service obligation remains, it's likely that the privatised Royal Mail, whose sole aim will be profit maximisation, will lobby hard for it to be dropped. What are the odds that in a few years time, the taxpayer will be subsiding a privatised Royal Mail to enable it to continue delivering the mail to remote rural areas six days a week? Let’s not forget that Britain’s privatised rail companies have received around four times in taxpayer subsidy than the publicly-owned British Rail did. It’s a neo-liberal myth that privatisation saves the taxpayer money - on the contrary; it invariably costs us far more than keeping the service ‘in house’.

If Britain was a genuine democracy- as it used to be in the period 1945-79, before the neo-liberals and neo-cons took over, the issue of Royal Mail privatisation would not even have been on the agenda.

But the very fact it was sold - with such a blatant disregard for public opinion - tells us everything we need to know about the country we have become. Our government doesn’t act in our interests, in the interests of the majority, but in the interests of powerful financial and business elites. It’s these elites who wanted the Royal Mail sold, not the British people.

The sell-off of this much-loved historic institution is proof that even after the successful democratic people's uprising which stopped our government taking us into a war against Syria - a war which no one outside elite circles wanted - there is still an awful lot of work to do.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

[Son Of God]

[borders]

great article from Neil Clark and you could not disagree any more , could you ?

here is another article from him ...



Labour's Chuka Umunna says there have been 'successful' privatisations - but NEIL CLARK struggles to think of any

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

One of the funniest moments in the hilarious Blackadder Goes Forth series was when our heroes are reminiscing about their time in the first world war trenches before the going "over the top" in the final "big push."

"I mean, we've had some good times. We've had damnably good laughs, eh?" says the silly-arse public schoolboy George (played by Hugh Laurie). "Yes. Can't think of any specific ones, myself..." replies Captain Blackadder.

I was reminded of that classic exchange when reading the article on Labour's policy towards the privatisation of the Royal Mail by shadow business secretary Chuka Umunna, published on the Huffington Post website.

"It is true that there have been successful privatisations in times past," Umunna wrote.

Really? Like Captain Blackadder, I can't think of any specific ones myself. I wonder what privatisations Mr Umunna had in mind?

British Telecom is the one usually cited as a "success" by Thatcherites, accompanied with the obligatory line about how you had to wait 27 years or so to get a new phone when the industry was state-run - but the reality is that the reason phone bills went down in real terms was new technology and not selling off BT.

Perhaps the shadow business secretary was thinking of Sealink, the British Rail ferry subsidiary.

What on Earth was the state doing running a ferry company, the Thatcherites scoffed. It would be much better off in the private sector!

Sealink was privatised in 1984. In the year ending December 31 1983 this "inefficient" state-owned business had made a profit before interest and tax of £12.8 million.

Sealink was bought by a Bermuda-based US company which was then was taken over by a Swedish-owned rival.

The name Sealink passed into the history books. A profitable British-owned company had been sunk by the neoliberals. What a great success!

Or maybe Umunna was thinking of BAA and our wonderful world-class privatised airports that are so pleasurable to spend time in.

If we look at the interests of workers, consumers, rail users, bus users, airport users and indeed the great majority of ordinary people, it is hard, if not impossible, to think of a single example of a "successful" privatisation.

Privatisation has only been "successful" if we look at it from the point of view of City financial institutions and wealthy shareholders.

For these groups it has been a runaway success. That's no accident but how it was always meant to be.

For privatisation was never about trying to "improve" services. Rather it was a process specifically designed to transfer wealth and resources away from the majority to a tiny minority.

It was an essential part of the neoliberal project which commenced in 1979 to radically restructure the postwar British economy so that it worked in the favour of the financial and business elites, and not ordinary people.

The latest stage in this ongoing neoliberal project is the sell-off of the Royal Mail, which has been in state hands since its inception in 1516.

In the first part of his article, Umunna makes all the right arguments about why the sell-off is such terrible news for Britain and how taxpayers will lose out on a massive scale.

"The government, having taken on over £37.5 billion pounds-worth of pension liabilities, in essence nationalised the debt of the business and is now privatising the profit at the very time that the business is beginning to render large profits - profits that are forecast to rise. They do so at a time when Royal Mail has shown it can deliver success in public hands," he writes.

But having put forward the powerful case against privatisation, Umunna then undoes all his good work by failing to make a commitment to renationalise Royal Mail if Labour come to power in 2015.

This comes after Umunna's own party conference voted overwhelmingly in favour of renationalisation.

A firm pledge by Labour to return Royal Mail to full public ownership on taking office in May 2015 could have sabotaged the forthcoming sell-off.

Given Labour's commanding lead in the opinion polls and the fact that the party is as short as 1-2 to win the next election, investors would surely have had second thoughts before buying shares in a company which would be renationalised in just over 18 months' time.

In fact, it could be argued that given the unpopularity of the privatisation and the fact that rural Tory MPs are reported to be worried - with justification - of losing their seats over the measure, a Labour pledge to renationalise from the start might have led the government to quietly shelve its plans.

The government is in a weak position over Royal Mail as it knows public support for a sell-off that even Thatcher ruled out is lacking, but it has been emboldened by the belief that while Labour would oppose the sale, it wouldn't pledge to renationalise.

If all this sounds familiar, then there's a depressing precedent.

In the 1990s Labour opposed rail privatisation while in opposition. At the 1995 conference leader Tony Blair declared: "To anyone thinking of grabbing our railways, built up over the years, so they can make a quick profit as our network is broken up and sold off, I say this - there will be a publicly owned and publicly accountable railway system under a Labour government."

But not long afterwards the pledge to renationalise was dropped, to the delight of the privatisers.

The rest, as they say, is history. Labour could have scuppered railway privatisation in the 1990s and it could have scuppered the privatisation of Royal Mail today.

But instead of fighting tooth and claw against neoliberalism, the party's leadership is still stuck to the idea of trying to make a flawed economic model work better for the people.

So in place of a commitment to renationalise, we get a pledge "to safeguard the services consumers and businesses get from a privatised Royal Mail." That's still more than we'd get from the Tories, but way short of what Labour should be offering.

The basic problem is that a privatised Royal Mail will do what all privatised companies have done, and that is put the interests of shareholders - and profit maximisation - before customers.

A privatised Royal Mail will lobby hard for the universal delivery obligation to be dropped on the grounds that it costs it too much money to deliver the mail each day to isolated dwellings in north Devon and the Yorkshire moors.

Either the obligation will be dropped or the government will step in to pay the privately owned Royal Mail to continue with it.

Either way ordinary people will lose out. Stamp prices, which have gone up by record amounts over the past two years to fatten the business up for City investors, will carry on rising above inflation.

Within a short space of time, our postal service will be radically different from the one we have today and an important part of our history and our social fabric will have been destroyed.

For people living in remote rural areas, the privatisation will be particularly catastrophic.

The lion's share of the blame for the destruction of the Royal Mail must of course go to our privatisation-crazy Con-Dem coalition.

But unless it changes its policy on renationalisation and delivers the commitment which its own members and the vast majority of the British people want, Labour will be guilty too.

[barbario]

A right royal rip-off - What the Royal Mail privatisation tells us about modern Britain

http://rt.com/op-edge/uk-royal-mail-pri ... ction-073/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

It’s the wilful destruction of another much-loved British institution. The privatisation of the Royal Mail, the British postal service, brings to an end nearly five hundred years of history- stretching back the days of King Henry VIII.

By privatising the Royal Mail, our coalition government has shown that it does not care a jot for our national heritage, or the devastating impact the sell-off will have on remote rural communities, or how the elderly and the poor will be disproportionately affected. They have shown us that all they care about is rewarding their wealthy backers in the City of London and keeping in with the giants of global capitalism.

Even Mrs Thatcher, the Prime Minister who started the privatisation process in Britain in 1979 thought that selling the Royal Mail was a step too far. However the current UK government with its fanatical commitment to neo-liberalism is determined to take us to dark, scary places that even the Iron Lady shied away from.

The British public, who know only too well from first-hand experience that privatisation invariably means higher prices and worse services, was overwhelmingly opposed to the sale. An opinion poll in July revealed that 67% were against the privatisation, with 36% ‘strongly’ opposed. Just 4% were ’strongly’ in favour. 96% of Royal Mail employees were against the sale too. Yet despite this overwhelming public opposition, the government arrogantly pushed ahead with its plans, showing once again the contempt with which it regards the views of the majority. Ludicrously the sell-off has been hailed by Prime Minister David Cameron as ‘a piece of popular capitalism’. In fact, it’s a piece of highly unpopular capitalism, in which the public have lost out in a massive way.

Once again, an asset that we- the British people- owned has been flogged off way below its real value. The fact that shares leapt by as much as 38% on the first day of conditional trading, shows us how much the government undervalued the company.

For instance, the Royal Mail’s real estate was valued at just £787m-a laughable figure considering that it owns some prime sites in our major cities, including a depot in London estimated to be worth £1bn. The Royal Mail plans to reduce its number of sites from 45 to 37 by 2016, with the profits from property sales going to the new private owners. Meanwhile, as the private investors gorge on the profits, we - the taxpayers - have been left holding Royal Mail pension fund liabilities of around £37.5bn - a clear case of nationalising the losses and privatising the gains.

The pledge by the Business Secretary Vince Cable that only ‘responsible, long-term institutional investors’ would be permitted to buy Royal Mail shares is at variance with the news that hedge funds, the vilest manifestation of modern vulture capitalism, have been allowed to invest. It’s been reported that Lansdowne Partners, one of the world’s biggest hedge funds, had taken ‘a massive stake’ in Royal Mail. Lansdowne are not the only giant of global capitalism to benefit, for the lead adviser to the government on the sale was none other than the ’great vampire squid’ itself, Goldman Sachs. Overall, the government paid £21.7m in fees to ‘advisers’ for advice on selling a company which the owners - the British public - didn’t want sold.

Whichever way you look at it the sell-off represents a right royal rip-off for the British taxpayer. There’ll be further costs down the line too. On Wednesday, the Royal Mail admitted that more postal workers will lose their jobs following the sell-off. And although the universal service obligation remains, it's likely that the privatised Royal Mail, whose sole aim will be profit maximisation, will lobby hard for it to be dropped. What are the odds that in a few years time, the taxpayer will be subsiding a privatised Royal Mail to enable it to continue delivering the mail to remote rural areas six days a week? Let’s not forget that Britain’s privatised rail companies have received around four times in taxpayer subsidy than the publicly-owned British Rail did. It’s a neo-liberal myth that privatisation saves the taxpayer money - on the contrary; it invariably costs us far more than keeping the service ‘in house’.

If Britain was a genuine democracy- as it used to be in the period 1945-79, before the neo-liberals and neo-cons took over, the issue of Royal Mail privatisation would not even have been on the agenda.

But the very fact it was sold - with such a blatant disregard for public opinion - tells us everything we need to know about the country we have become. Our government doesn’t act in our interests, in the interests of the majority, but in the interests of powerful financial and business elites. It’s these elites who wanted the Royal Mail sold, not the British people.

The sell-off of this much-loved historic institution is proof that even after the successful democratic people's uprising which stopped our government taking us into a war against Syria - a war which no one outside elite circles wanted - there is still an awful lot of work to do.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

Don't worry about it mate,Vince Cable is very relaxed about it.