The Royal Mail
It amazes me that Royal Mail is such a bind. We live in an age when we are buying increasing amounts online and having it delivered to our doors, while the RM is by definition a company that has to be able or deliver to every property in the UK every working day of the week. A natural fit and a great chance for the RM you might think.
And yet despite massive prices rises, huge efforts to cut back on its services and obligations the RM is in crisis and is now being take over by a foreign company, which is bound to work well, what could possibly go wrong?
The simple fact us that some utilities and services are too important to be left to the private sector, and the profit motive. Frankly I gave not a damn about the privatisation of shares in BP or Bae or even BL. They can sink or swim on their own merits and good luck to them, but the Thatcherite urge to privatise anything and everything, no matter how badly became some kind of macho madness, that made rabies look curable.
The airports were privatised as one company, an amazing act of monopolistic stupidity, water was whored to the asset strippers, BT was and is a huge monolith, water, electricity and gas are essential to every other business. Real, regulated competition might just have worked but these are natural monopolies and the things they supply are far too important to ever let the companies fail. They are as a result badly run, appalling badly regulated, and a drag on every other part of the economy.
Thatcherism was not just wrong, it has been a disaster and yet we are still following it religiously, because its supporters still tell us it was a triumph.
If you control the narrative, no matter what the facts, you own the agenda.
Any attack on Margaret, any criticism, is now portrayed as treason and betrayal. But look at the facts.
Weak utilities, weak growth, lower home ownership, higher taxes, higher energy costs, terrible infrastructure, mad rail networks, and an international joke.
But don’t attack the memory of the Sainted Maggie, she saved the country and turned it around. Honest
From Jonty Bloom Media Ltd
Economics, trade and Brexit, not necessarily in that order
Thatcherism has much to answer for - British jewels such as the NHS and BBC are on their knees, housing costs are beyond many young people profiting only big finance by huge mortgages and value increases to older homeowners locked up until sold to pay for elder care. Socially valuable things such as care (youth clubs, social services etc) and culture (music and arts) are left to inadequate charities. And then there’s Brexit…
The trouble is that selling national goods off appeared to work well in the short term. But as Harold MacMillan inferred about the family silver, where do you go next? Gold, house, land? It should be a rule: if there is no market, don't privatise.