“Lord” Mandelson (a man for whom I have a loathing that cannot be described), fresh from blowing £80,000 of our money tarting up his office, has chosen today for the first reading of his privatisation of the Royal Mail bill. (A good day to bury bad news, perhaps)

To be honest, I’m not sure what to think about the Royal Mail. Yes, it’s a grand institution and one that we should be proud of, but sadly, no one’s really sending letters any more and they haven’t really managed to find anything to keep the services up to date. That said, there are always queues in every post office in London every lunchtime, so they must be doing something right!

So, what’s the STW opinion on this proposed part-privatisation?

they pissed away the empire
they pissed away the railways.
why stop there?

Take something that absorbs a lot of money, but we all get something out of and turn it into something that absorbs a lot of money and we all get nothing in return.

That’ll work

no one’s really sending letters any more

But.

there are always queues in every post office in London every lunchtime

It seems like it’s a service that is required, running at low or non-existent profit margins. Would privatisation increase the emphasis on increasing the profit, perhaps at the expense of the service? That is how privatisation usually works.

I thought your boys were all in favour. I said you were mellowing.

All the banks were running unprofitably, in danger of going out of business and putting thousands out of work. Gordie and Pufter Pete said that the only way out was to nationalise them.

The Post Office is running unprofitably, in danger of going out of business and putting thousands out of work. Gordie and Pufter Pete say that the only way out is to privatise it.

Can anyone explain this? Could it be that the main banks involved were Royal Bank of Scotland, and Halifax Bank of Scotland?

RM was always seen as a cash cow, so in tune with all post war government’s desire to take as much as possible out of cash cows without re-investing any of the profits, those cash cows suddenly find at some point that they have outdated, inflexible working practices and technology at which point they’re effectively broken. This is now the time to suggest that bringing in private money and expertise will fix them, when in actual fact all that they will do is make a lot of money by selling off what appears to be underused property. After a while the private owners forget that they are running a public service as they are making lots of money with the property they’re selling off. After a while there is no more property, all the workers are sick of having bizarre management practices imposed upon them and wage freezes and reductions and so have no motivation to work. At some point the private operators realise that its all gone wrong and walk away. The taxpayer picks up the pieces to find that whatever service that was being offered before privatisation cannot now be provided and everyone loses except for those who made money in the first 3 or 4 years of privatisation. Oh, and then you discover that actually that piece of property might have beeen very useful in joining up a couple of sensible ideas, but unfortunately its got a supermarket on it now.
Except of course that the RM hasn’t actually been privatised but instead has had all the profitable services “opened up to the market” leaving all the unprofitable services solely to it and then been subjected to some classic catastrophic management that makes some of the decisions made elsewhere recently look positively first class.

The idea that Royal mail is losing money is a myth.They are predicting to announce profits in the region of 350m this year.The problem comes with the huge hole in the pension fund.They are trying to sell off parts of the company to help boost the fund.The reason for the deficit is 18 years of government neglect in terms of paying into it.They decided to take a payment “holiday” for those years which is why they are now short of cash.

Time to pay back the 80’s pension holiday money. Another example of the financial services industry screwing us over.

I’m in 2 minds…

I don’t send letters.
I don’t want to receive paper bills.
I only want internet orders delivered by RM as they leave a card through the door and the sorting office where I can pick them up is just down the road.
All courier Co’s are miles away.

Mostly, I don’t need RM, but they are handy & local

As what everybody says above, Mandelson will spilt the Labour Party in two.Worked for the company for around ten years now and they are finally getting a proper days work out of me,that does not annoy me its just the way they blame the workforce for any **** ups or atagonize the union with lies and unbelieveable statements about the way they have mismanaged the pension funds.

Rich CWU Rep!

CWU rep…I hope the union will stop funding a party who wants to get rid of a huge % of workers ??
Although i doubt the unions will be allowed to exchange millions of ££££’s for policy in the future.So the Labour party has little to lose when upsetting the unions.

I’m not talking about making a profit now – I’m talking about the surchage which meant that 20-30 years ago any operating surplus was hoovered up to pay for, oh I don’t know – failing car companies maybe?

yup, not like most things that were privatised as loss making trainwreks (catastrophicaly litteral in the case of the railways) are now making big proffits, which of course we now hate them for.

British Gas? Pahhhh, the energy business will never make money will it?

What Tinman says.

They are in need of modernisation. Thing is the government will sell off all the profitable bits and get left with the crud at the end.

last bastion of the 1970,s work place, I say bring it on!

Royal Mail stops buying ldv vans, ldv wants money from the government, hbos, and the other banks want money from the government, so why not just transfer the services of royal mail to the banks.

Also stop RM management imposeing stupid rules on the workers to cause strikes.

project, you bring in the LDV link, interesting…..! Anything to do with Mandleson’s recent yachting holiday?

As a former employee…
get my pension sorted out!
Not that I am missing it one little bit 😆

If Lord Mendleson as a 60 year olds gay man cant sort out a gang of left wing working class union activists what chance has anyone else, everyone knows the above are terrified of the former.

I am not sure how true it is that no one is using the royal mail.

I can say with total confidence that I have used the royal mail a huge amount more since internet shopping took off than I ever did earlier in my life. The amount of mail I send is not any less either, though I have never been a big sender of mail.

It seems to me the people running the Royal Mail are doing everything they can to make the public discontent with the service on purpose and to discourage people from using it, to fit with the governments desire for a figures drop. I am sure the same managers and their friends will do very nicely in any privatisation – pay rises and share handouts and promises of golden handshakes.

I wonder if the mail would have the same ‘problems’ if all the present board/managers were sacked for incompetence and barred for life (both themselves and their families) from holding office or owning shares in the privatised mail?

Ineffective or wilfully incompetent managers should be sacked before any privatisation is considered. I mean, what idiot decided your letter should be measured in 3 separate ways before telling you how much it will cost? That’s a way of saving money and improving public service and usage is it?

Do we say these present managers are ‘innocent’ and have an impossible task and its not their fault the service has gone downhill? Well, if the task is genuinely impossible no amount of privatising can save the mail service. But they already have keen bidders for it and I doubt the bidders are fools. So one can only presume that it being run badly and not profitably enough is deliberate and wilful and there are significant ulterior motives.

Anyone need to make a load of cash on the cheap?

if all the present board/managers were sacked for incompetence and barred for life (both themselves and their families) from holding office or owning shares in the privatised mail?

What a good idea 😯

And which in a strange sort of way, reminds of how when the railways were privatised, the only company which was barred from bidding for the franchises, was British Rail. Very peculiar considering that BR was the only company in the UK at the time, which had any experience at all with running trains. Still had they been allowed, they might have been successful. Which would have been hugely embarrassing to a government that was committed to proving that nationalised industries were a failure.

I’ve always found the service from royal mail and post office good; especially in comparison to DHL/Fedex etc.

Seems to me the government have created this situation by opening up the postal market to competition … in the future the profitable parts will be done by plc’s while we subsidise the post office to do the bits they don’t want to do. Contrast with the past where the post office turned a profit for the government.

I think the goverment are doing the equivalent of selling all your bikes to pay off the credit card.

Yup, sell off another publicly owned utility so a small group of rich, fat old men can get even richer and fatter.