EU delivers hammer blow to RM plans with ban on State help

[TrueBlueTerrier]

EU delivers hammer blow to Royal Mail plans with ban on State help

http://www.ukip.org/newsroom/news/708-e ... state-help" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

The UK Government will be helpless to prevent huge job losses and a looming pensions disaster when the Royal Mail is privatised, due to EU regulation

Paul Nuttall MEP, UKIP Deputy Leader points out that Westminster will be hamstrung by the same EU regulations that forced it into privatisation.

“It was of course three successive EU Postal Services Directives that created this mess, and under the same law the Government will be banned from giving the Royal Mail any state aid if it catastrophically fails.

“The Postal Services Directive made it clear that the market for mail delivery had to be opened up to competition. As a result, the more profitable services such as business mail were forced to compete with cheaper foreign competitors while Royal Mail was lumbered with the costly hand-delivery and sorting processes. On top of that, as life has moved progressively online we are sending fewer and fewer letters. The Royal Mail was doomed.

“Now the final nail is in the coffin and the Royal Mail will become fully privatised, it’s going to really struggle to compete in the market place. In order to survive there will have to be closures. There will have to be job losses. These employees’ shares that are being championed by the Prime Minister will be completely and utterly worthless. But under EU state aid rules the UK Government will be strictly forbidden from helping the Royal Mail with taxpayers’ money. It will also be forbidden to help plug the £9 billion pension pot deficit.

“We will be left with a completely destroyed Royal Mail, once a proud British institution that did so much more than just deliver letters. We can thank the EU for that, and we can also thank the EU when Westminster finally wakes up and realises there’s a disaster in the post.”

Notes:

• The directives forced Royal Mail to take the burden of the universal obligation to deliver all personal mail, while being forced open up to competition in the business mail section of the service to foreign competitors.

• Business mail is the profitable side of the service which helps to pay for the less profitable personal mail. However the EU has allowed companies to compete with Royal Mail for business mail, thus reducing the vital income that they needed to survive. This has of course made the service much poorer. Many of the foreign companies which now compete with Royal Mail, such as DHL, are foreign state subsidised.

• It was EU state-aid laws which resulted in the closing of thousands of Post Offices several years ago. These EU rules are intended to stop the government intervening to "distort" the EU Common Market by favouring one company over the other - but in practise what happened was that the Government was banned, by the EU Commission, to give the Post Office network the subsidies it needed to keep every branch open - which led to large-scale closures up and down the country.

• Labour MEP, Brian Simpson, championed the legislation and helped to force it through the EU parliament! Yet the Labour party now pretend it's a bad thing to privatise the mail

• There were several votes in the EU "parliament" on this privatisation of the mail service and at every stage it was only UKIP that voted against. Labour, Lib Dems and the Tories all voted in favour of these EU laws.

[pants123]

germany did not win the wars.... but they god damn rule all of Europe now, including the U.K...

royal mail is doomed.....

crafty bastards the Germans are..

[TrueBlueTerrier]

To be honest not sure if this is an old article or a badly researched one. The £9 billion deficit has been settled and the EU agreed it was okay - that happened ages ago. However, the alert I got it from came today and the articles near to it on the site seem fairly recent, google alerts has let me down in the past though.

[pants123]

To be honest not sure if this is an old article or a badly researched one. The £9 billion deficit has been settled and the EU agreed it was okay - that happened ages ago. However, the alert I got it from came today and the articles near to it on the site seem fairly recent, google alerts has let me down in the past though.

whether it's a badly researched or not,,, i'm a cynical person on this, the "so called elite" don't give a care in the world about the working man or woman trying to make a living to support their families..

all the ,,,,so called elite people,,, think about is money in their own GOD damn back pocket......

[clashcityrocker]

To be honest not sure if this is an old article or a badly researched one.

It is UKIP.
It is both badly researched and out of date.
Like everything to do with UKIP.

[123456]

badly researched or not..ukip are against privatisation,most people will contiue with voting labour(stop giggling) or tory(stop tittering),or the wet lib dems..seems most have been sucked into new labours social engineering project..