The Tories and their LibDem lackeys have used our taxpayers’ money to fatten up Royal Mail for the slaughter, then sacrificed it to the greed of their City speculator owners by flogging it at knock-down prices. In the process doing the bidding of their Brussels bosses, whose EU rules demand that member statres sell off their public assets in this way.
Before throwing a 500 year old British institution to the sharks, Cameron, Clegg and Cable made it more appetising by using £8 billion of our public money to buy up its pension liabilities and pumping more billions into Royal Mail itself to make it a suitably juicy piece of prey. They also put up the price of stamps in advance, no doubt so their reactionary mouthpieces could have a moan about “inefficient and expensive nationalised industries” and the new Capitalist owners wouldn’t get the blame.
The City sharks have responded by going into a feeding frenzy. £27 billion of their funds were offered in advance for an initial share issue offered at just £1.7 billion. Totally unsurprisingly, the shares, once on the market, shot up in price by 36% in the first few hours.
One major excuse for this privatisation, raising as much money as possible to pay of the colossal and still increasing national debt Tory, LibDem and Labour have run up over the past decades, has just thereby been revealed as specious. In reality, Royal Mail has been sold off cheap to make more money for the global pluticrats who own that national debt and the political parties they fund who incurred it. As Billy Mayes, General Secretary of the Communication Workers Union, rightly told the BBC “It’s basically David Cameron rewarding his mates in the City”.
As with the first wave of “Tell Sid” privatisations in the 1980’s, much Tory propaganda in the short term will focus on small investors – “Mrs Miggins” as Vince Cable called them – making windfall profits by selling on the shares the Tories sold cheap to them. Then the propaganda hype goes quiet, and they hope we the public don’t notice what happens next.
What happens next is the Mrs Migginses sell their shares on to the City speculators. As Matt Basi, head of UK sales trading at CMC Markets, observed investment funds are “queuing up to make big purchases” of the Royal Mail shares.
These City spivs in turn sell the shares on, as previous privatisations have shown, to foreign, in fact global, multinational corporations. Who are then free to strip assets, cut services and hike up prices. As we are all about to see again in the latest round of gas and electricity price rises just announced extorted by the six mostly foreign multinationals who now own and monopolise our energy supply.
Royal Mail will before too long end up in the hands of foreign multinational corporations. They will then asset-strip out the profitable parcels service, flog off at a vast mark up city and town centre sorting offices and other buildings, no doubt to be turned into more Tescos to undercut and ruin more small British family shops, lay off lots of postmen and women, and vastly hike up the price of stamps. A centuries-old proud tradition of public service will be replaced by bottom-line obsessed moneygrubbing, and we will pay the cost. The smile will be wiped off Mrs Miggin’s face when her £250 windfall profit is eaten up in a higher cost of living, as happened with gas, electricity and so on.
When this happens, remember you read it here first…..
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I am one of those “retail” customers who managed to buy £750 worth of these shares, now worth about £1000.I have no intention of selling them
I take no pride in this. I very much object having to to buy back part of something I and all other UK citizens already own. It is like a burglar stealing your silverware from your kitchen and then coming round to your front door and offering to sell it back to you.
At least I have bought a ticket to the Royal Mail PLC AGM when I can tell them what I think of this crime. No doubt the city fat cats who have made such a killing from public property will reward Cameron and Co handsomely in due course.
I hope I live to see the day when a nationalist government will instruct the City Fraud Squad to cuff this lot!
Didn’t the Tories allocate 70% of the issue to their pals in the City of London, with just 30% going to that section of the British public having the spare cash to buy a crumb or two? What’s the betting that the future will see Cameron and Osborne leave politics for cushy “advisor” posts with one or more of their City pals?
One of the postal people said the Saudi I think it was royals had bought shares and would have more influence than our own Royal Family.
And people still doubt LibLabCon intend the total destruction of Britain.
I think you’ll find Royal Mail privatisation was in fact a Labour manoeuver. Not a Tory one. In fact its prime agent being Alan Johnson earstwhile postman and CWU president.
Was not Blair the reincarnation of Thatcher, selling off anything worth a shilling, and of course the EU our real masters edicts on selling off the mail services of all its member states. I wonder how the privatisation of German postal services and that of France are progressing?
It’ true Cameron has fattened the goose But laying blame there is a mistake. For all three sing from the same hymn book. The one written by Ed Milipedes old dad Ralph. Whom they resurrected recently. So the plight and future of the UK mail service must be seen as a crime all three parties need to be held account for. Just as the other major utilities were.
(Party Member) Well said Baz 4545. For the record on the structure of business in our policy document we say: ” We favour private enterprise for most areas of the economy. However, we believe that natural monopolies such as the POSTAL SYSTEM and eventually the railways should be publicly owned in the form of public corporations. I envisage that the shares will be compulsorily purchased at the original issue price. However, that will be up to our Minister for Trade and Industry. What a happy thought! Postmen and women, help make it happen and join us today.
I am both a Nationalist and a CWU member and can confirm the future looks bleak for us postal workers! The so-called “free shares” for the workforce have strings attached which is never mentioned in the media.
I am an associate member of the BDP but next year will take full membership.
It was in fact “New Labour” who started the ball rolling and now the coalition has finished the job – and yes it will mean the death of a postal service we have always been proud of!
I can’t see how it can be successfully privatised without services being undermined in the future eg what will be the fate of those in places like the Scottish Highlands and Dartmoor, the Lake District etc?
It’s a profoundly silly privatisation. There are a few things that should be owned by the state and the post is definitely one of them along with water and electricity. I can see, however, why British Airways was sold-off.
Even Mrs Thatcher never dared to flog-off the Royal Mail or the railways! I wonder what the Queen thinks of this? If I were her I would regard it as an insult.
(Party Member) As a young man in the 1970’s I was always against the Labour mantra of ‘nationalisation’. As a Patriot I was always embarrassed by the products of British Leyland. As a ‘Brummie’ I was incensed by the Longbridge Factory and it’s constant drain on the public purse. The management were a disgrace. The union leaders were all raving communists led by ‘Red Robbo’. However, times have changed! The British Democratic Party policy of the country owning the Post Office, water supply industry, gas, electricity and dare I say it, coal industry and railways, is correct. In a world of ever dwindling natural recourses these things need to be run by and for the benefit of the British people. Foreign ownership of our energy companies is a national disgrace. Although they are doing a good job, for an Indian company to own our Jaguar and Landrover cannot be right. This Post Office sell off just shows how right our British Democratic Party is on all this. Join us Today for a Better Britain.
In reply to John Shaw.
As I’m sure you’re aware the generation of electricity is not in the private sector. All these so called private foreign companies are is middle men. Collecting payment at an inflated price as all middle men do. The infrastructure was all laid down by the then public sector. I’m not sure that some of these companies do actual repairs, and new installations.
The one sure thing is that in the near future those living in remote areas will get postal drop points where they will have to collect their mail as the new private company consolidates its workforce. Code for mass redundancies. The CWU know this, but their aim is purely to keep collecting its members fees. Perhaps I’m slandering them as they may have no choice. But I have always been of the opinion that the unions post war have been in cahoots with the wreckers.
The possibility being they will invest some of their vast income in shares of the new company. Only a view educated or otherwise.
Noises about putting up the price of letter delivery are already being made, along with redundancies on the parcel side as more mechanisation is needed to stay competitive.
You can see they have been gearing up to privatisation in the last few years by the increases in postage rates, but massive yearly increases in the cost of a PO Box are obscene. Plus VAT was added to their services two years ago.
!50,000 employees will drop by a third within 5 years. Remember BT.