The cheque is in the post
The news that the Royal Mail is once again in play is really quite depressing. It seems we have learnt nothing. Making essential and monopoly services the easy targets for foreign investors, does not tend to end well.
For a start it really does not help staff morale to know they are the play thing of international financiers, and the Royal Mail has a very large workforce, which it is totally dependent on.
Secondly the history of water privatisation gives us a very good idea of what could happen. Water companies have been wrecked by foreign firms, siphoning off profits, loading them with huge debts, under investing and taking on the regulator, successfully.
What the government really has to ask itself is, why does a foreign firm want to own the Royal Mail?
Has it a background in delivering the post? Is it driven by an overwhelming desire to improve services and invest in the nation’s postal services? Has it a history of running businesses for the national good?
Of course, all of these questions should have been asked before the privatisation of Royal Mail, but they weren’t. Now it is apparently just another firm ripe for the plucking, even though a universal postal service is a sine non qua of a modern functioning economy and society.
But who cares? If someone can make more money buying and selling the company what’s wrong with that?
It is not like we have been warned.
Economics, trade and Brexit, not necessarily in that order but the dog always comes first.
By Jonty Bloom Media
Like much selling-off of assets to private 'investors' (ha!), it is simply based in ideology