Privatisation damages services and costs too many jobs

[TrueBlueTerrier]

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By Michael Thompson

I write regarding your article Royal Mail sell-off 'a disaster for rural areas' say critics, (WMN September 3)

The privatisation of Royal Mail by this ideologically driven, small state, low income tax, deficit cutting, welfare hating, food bank creating, bedroom tax, right wing Tory Government is a mistake. Tory voters everywhere will rue the day they voted for David Cameron in 2010, because privatisation means cuts in services, and deteriorating working conditions for staff. Further increases in postage stamps will continue to personally affect the general public.

Our Royal Mail public service is as important a British asset as our National Health Service. Once any form of privatisation occurs, the profit motive is assured.

I believe in nationalisation because nationalisation creates jobs and keep workers and their conditions at work, secure. Privatisation is all about deteriorating working conditions for the staff, and consequently no security for the postmen and woman who deliver the public's mail through their letter box six days a week, where in other parts of the world the general public do not have the personal service Britain's Royal Mail service has always provided..

Privatisation is right wing Tory ideology at it's worse.

A brief example would be the former Tory leader John Major privatisation of our railways in 1992. According to Labour's Carolyn Flint on a not so recent Question Time programme via BBC 1, privatisation of our railways cost British tax payers £400 billion a year to uphold, where as another panellist stated that Nationalisation, prior to the 1980's cost £100 billion. So it would be cheaper to nationalise the railways other than to privatise.

I used to be a postman at Guildford sorting office for 13 years, so I have seen working conditions change first hand.In 1974, I joined the amalgamated Post Office, and Royal Mail when it was a nationalised public service funded by tax payers for the use of tax payers.
The Tories have wanted to privatise the Royal Mail/Post Office for decades, when Margaret Thatcher's right wing Tory government came into power in 1979, one of the initial cut backs on the periphery of privatisation was that the postman and woman's Christmas casual help was taken away, and mechanisation introduced to replace hand sorting by postal staff, and all in the name of so called cost cutting efficiency, micro economics.

Casuals at Christmas helped the regular postmen and woman with the heavy posting, and casuals were needed, when casuals were taken away the postman and woman had to stay behind and sort the mail, and the second delivery was cancelled. Shareholders don't care about the poorest people struggling to pay their bills.

Since the 80s this just about sums up the main reason for the deterioration of my country, the fast buck, while the poorest people have gone to the wall.

[barbario]

Too late.