ROYAL MAIL – THROWN TO THE SHARKS

by BDPAdmin on Oct 11th, 2013 · 1 Comment

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 Topry, 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 Tescoes 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.

http://britishdemocraticparty.org/royal-mail-thrown-to-the-sharks/