Anti-Fascist sent "Go home" text by Home Office

UKBA left red-faced after anti-racism campaigner and anti-fascist Suresh Grover and immigration caseworker Bobby Chan were sent text messages telling them to leave the country

In addition to the issue of harassment of migrant workers, this case is all the more chilling because of what it proves about government agencies having access to and knowledge of everyone's mobile phone details, and because it shows the govt using that information to target intimidation at anti-racist campaigners -

 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/antiracism-campaigner-and-immigration-caseworker-sent-go-home-text-messages-by-home-office-8886200.html

Less than two weeks since the Home Office anti-immigration vans were banned by the advertising watchdog for using “misleading” statistics, the UK Border Agency has come under fire for telling an anti-racism campaigner and an immigration adviser to leave the country in a text. On behalf of UKBA, private contractor Capita sent leading campaigner Suresh Grover a text telling him he had no right to live here. The same text was sent to Bobby Chan, an Immigration Caseworker at Central London Community Law.

Mr Grover, who founded the anti-racism charity The Monitoring Group, has campaigned for justice for Stephen Lawrence, Zahid Mubarek and Victoria Climbie. He also runs race relations advice surgeries across London. He told the Independent “ I was absolutely shocked and quite horrified to receive the text. I thought it wasn’t meant for me. I came here with my parents in 1966, I was born in East Africa and have always had a British passport.”

Mr Grover rang the number on the text and got through to Capita. They told him that he was indeed the right recipient of the text. Despite explaining he had lived in Britain for 50 years, the woman on the other end of the line pressed for more information. “The more I talked to the woman the more angry I got,” Mr Grover said.

“She was asking for more personal information about me and was not telling me where she got my number. I’m not going to be giving them information I don’t think they deserve. I think it’s outrageous sending people random texts without knowing who they are sending them to. I was angry but i was also bemused, because of the work I do. But I think people who don’t work in this area may take them seriously and be worried they don’t have the right to live in the UK. It’s horrific.”

Mr Grover said he realised he wasn't alone when talking to his acquaintance Bobby Chan, who had received the same message. Mr Chan is accredited immigration adviser at a central London law centre who has given evidence as an expert witness to the Home Affairs select committee. Yet he received a text stating “Message from the UK Border Agency. You are required to leave the UK as you no longer have right to remain.”
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/antiracism-campaigner-and-immigration-caseworker-sent-go-home-text-messages-by-home-office-8886200.html

http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2013/10/513237.html

Ex-EDL leaders will not face court over alleged obstruction of police

CPS drops charges against Tommy Robinson and Kevin Carroll over ban on marching to scene of Lee Rigby murder via mosque

•  

Tommy Robinson (real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) arrives at Westminster magistrates' court, where he discovered the case had been discontinued. Photograph: Anthony Devlin/PA

Two former English Defence League leaders will not have to answer a charge of obstructing police after prosecutors deemed there was insufficient evidence against them.
Tommy Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, and his second cousin Kevin Carroll were accused of trying to defy a ban on marching to the scene of the murder of soldier Lee Rigby passed a mosque.
The pair each denied a charge of obstructing police outside Aldgate East Tube station, east London, on 29 June.
When Yaxley-Lennon arrived at Westminster magistrates' court to stand trial on Wednesday morning, he discovered the case had been discontinued. The Crown Prosecution Service said there was insufficient evidence to bring the case.
The pair were attempting to stage what they claimed was a charity walk to Woolwich Barracks, in south-east London, via the East London Mosque, with a plan to lay flowers in memory of Fusilier Rigby in Woolwich on Armed Forces Day.
Police said they offered two alternative routes that avoided Tower Hamlets, home to the East London Mosque, and warned that anyone who tried to march to Woolwich would face arrest.
A CPS spokeswoman said: "Both defendants were charged by police with obstructing a police officer in the execution of her duty, contrary to s89(2) Police Act 1996. The file was then passed to CPS London to prepare the prosecution case.
"When this case was reviewed, the lawyer concluded that there was insufficient evidence to prove that the actions of the suspects amounted to the offence of obstructing a police officer in the execution of her duty, contrary to s89(2) Police Act 1996. We therefore discontinued the case."
The pair, who set up the EDL in 2009, disclosed their withdrawal from the group this month.
Yaxley-Lennon will appear at the same court later on Wednesday to answer two further public order charges relating to an EDL demonstration in east London on 7 September.
He is accused as a public assembly organiser of failing to comply with the condition of limiting speeches at the rally to 30 minutes. He is also alleged to have incited others to breach the condition. He has indicated that he will plead not guilty to the charges.
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/oct/16/edl-tommy-robinson-carroll-cps-drop-charges

NWN: Well who would have thought it ? Fancy that.

Mainstream baffled as French turn to far right

French far-right Front National party President Marine Le Pen and her father Jean-Marie Le Pen acknowledge the audience at the party's summer congress on September 15, 2013 in Marseille, southern France

Bruno Gollnisch, Front National far-right party candidate for the municipal elections in Hyeres, France, poses on October 14, 2013

Marine Le Pen, president of the French far-right Front National party, delivers a speech on October 12, 2013 in Paris

AFP - France's mainstream political parties were Monday scratching their heads over what to do about a surge by the Front National (FN) after a breakthrough by-election win for the far-right party.
The ruling Socialist party and the centre-right Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), the party of former president Nicolas Sarkozy, face humiliating reverses in municipal and European elections next year if the FN can sustain its current standing in the eyes of an electorate thoroughly fed-up with record unemployment, rising taxes and a perceived increase in crime and insecurity.
A poll published last week suggested the FN could emerge as the best-supported party in the European elections with 24 percent of those asked declaring themselves ready to back the party led by Marine Le Pen, the daughter of FN founder Jean-Marie Le Pen.

That shock survey was followed on Sunday by a spectacular victory for the FN in a local by-election in Brignoles, where FN candidate Laurent Lopez claimed 53.9 percent of the vote in a run-off against the UMP candidate.
"The left and the mainstream right are blaming each other for what is happening, but the reality is they've both been knocked sideways," said Nonna Mayer, the Research Director at the National Research Centre CNRS. "Neither of them know what to do."
There were particular, local factors in Brignoles which influenced the outcome of a vote being held for the third time, the result having been judged too close to stand on two previous occasions, when the run-off was between the FN and the Communist Party.
The southeastern town has struggled with high unemployment since the closure of local aluminium mines in the 1990s and the gloomy economic backdrop has exacerbated tensions between established residents and a large community of North African immigrants, creating fertile ground for the FN in a region where it traditionally does better than elsewhere in France.
But the scale of the victory for Lopez was nevertheless widely interpreted as an indicator of how the FN is capitalising on current voter concerns to appeal to a broader slice of the electorate than ever before.
A smartly-dressed former businessman, Lopez, 48, is the perfect embodiment of the more voter-friendly image that the FN has projected since Marine Le Pen took over from her controversial father at the head of the party in 2011.

Harder to treat as a pariah party


The pledges to end net immigration, most controversially by ripping up family reunion rules, and to begin moves to pull France out of the European Union, remain in place.
But the FN is now far from being a one-issue party, notably making its voice heard on education to the extent that it has recently been able to announce the creation of a network of supporters amongst teachers - an unthinkable development a decade ago.

Marine Le Pen, has worked hard to dispel the image of the party as fundamentally racist.
She has expelled activists who make bigoted public statements and the FN lists in next year's municipal elections will include a handful of ethnic minority candidates.
All of which is making it harder for the mainstream parties to prevent the FN from winning more than a handful of elected posts by treating it as a pariah party and urging their voters to cast their ballots tactically to keep them out of power, an approach referred to as the "Republican Front".
"I think we can safely say the Republican Front is now dead," Marine Le Pen declared after Sunday's triumph in Brignoles, and her opponents acknowledged that she was probably right.
"It just doesn't work, voters don't like being told who to vote for," said Thierry Mandon, the spokesman for the Socialists' parliamentary party.
Despite the current disarray of the mainstream parties, the CNRS's Mayer still believes the recent upturn in the fortunes of the FN remains primarily a protest phenomenon.
"The change of leadership has given the party a slightly slicker image, but for most French people, it remains an extreme right party founded on racist ideas which is incapable of governing," Mayer told AFP.
"Marine Le Pen does have a better image than her father. Unlike him she is not associated with the legacy of the second world war and anti-semitism.

"Local factors played heavily in their favour in Brignoles. On a national level there is enormous disappointment after a year of the Socialists back in power, and the issues of crime and insecurity are beginning to weigh heavily in the national debate, which plays in the FN's favour.
"But don't forget that, in the municipals, the FN will have candidates in one town in six at most. It is not as strong as it pretends to be."
http://www.france24.com/en/20131014-mainstream-baffled-french-turn-far-right

How to welcome unwanted immigrants the Russian way !

Over 380 detained after anti-migrant riot in southern Moscow

Moscow police said they detained some 380 people during the mass rioting in a southern district of the city. A mixed crowd of nationalists and locals attacked a warehouse run by natives of the Caucasus, blaming a migrant for the fatal stabbing of a local.
Moscow police said they were putting into effect an emergency plan, codenamed “Volcano,” involving sending scores of riot police to the scene of the clashes, and placing the police officers across the city on high alert. 
A crowd of people on Sunday broke into a vegetable warehouse in the southern district of Biryulyovo, hurling rocks, smashing up stalls and vending machines. While the police estimated the crowd at about 350 people, witnesses at the scene suggested the number of rioters could be as many as 1,000.

A man hits a vending machine with a traffic cone in a vegetable warehouse complex in the Biryulyovo district of Moscow October 13, 2013 (Reuters / Maxim Shemetov)

Some of the most aggressive participants of the unrest clashed with riot police and attempted to block the street after several people were detained and forced into police vans.
Riot police, who were about 200 strong at the time, failed to block part of the crowd from rushing in the direction of the warehouse.

Police officers detain participants of the mass riots during people's gathering in Moscow's Biryulyovo Zapadnoye District, where local residents gathered demanding to find the murderers of Yegor Shcherbakov (RIA Novosti / Ramil Sitdikov)

The violent scenes came after a similar rampage took place at a nearby shopping center, where the rioters had originally gathered. The outraged crowd demanded that the police find the killer of a 25-year-old Russian, who was stabbed to death on Thursday allegedly by a man from the Caucasus or Central Asia.
The locals also lashed at the the authorities, accusing them of covering the wave of migrant crime and the illegal immigration in the area.
Reports said that the police did not interfere while a crowd of rioters looted the warehouse and the mall, but later started to arrest those who remained on the scene. RT’s Lucy Kafanov reported that the situation in the district was largely settled by nightfall.
However, later on Sunday some 300 people gathered near the devastated shopping mall and reportedly tried to block the nearby road again. The mob began to hurl bottles at riot police after they attempted to prevent the action, said a Ridus.ru correspondent, who was hit by one of the bottles.

RIA Novosti / Ramil Sitdikov

He added that the police responded forcefully and began detaining “each and all, including journalists.”
Police also used helicopters to monitor the situation, RIA Novosti reported. 
The situation remained tense throughout the whole district, with police sources telling Interfax that a fight between a group of football fans and a group of men from the Caucasus broke out amid the riots. Five people have been taken to hospital with various injuries following the incident, and one more injured person refused to be hospitalized.

Police authorities said 5 riot police officers were wounded in the clashes, including a battalion commander.

At least 11 other people sought medical help in connection with the riots, medics said, adding that none of them were seriously injured.

Anti-migrant protesters attack shopping mall

Residents of the Biryulyovo district in southern Moscow took to the streets following the fatal stabbing of Egor Shcherbakov, a Muscovite, earlier in the week. Late on Thursday evening, when Shcherbakov and his girlfriend were on their way home, the young couple were attacked by an unidentified man who stabbed Shcherbakov with a knife. 
Shcherbakov’s girlfriend described the attacker as a male native of the Caucasus and said that he had assaulted her boyfriend after trying to harass her.
On Saturday a group of about 40 people gathered for a protest in the area, urging the police to find and punish the attacker. They demanded that the district’s police chief resign, and that a local vegetable warehouse, where many migrants work, be closed.  
However, the protest was followed by an unsanctioned rally on Sunday, which turned violent as hundreds of angry protesters attacked a shopping mall – attempting to set it on fire and breaking windows. A group of people among the crowd reportedly broke into stores, ransacking them and looting goods.   
Several police officers were injured by bottles thrown by protesters, while an elderly female relative of Shcherbakov’s narrowly escaped being hit by one of the bottles.   
Protesters demanded that all the suspected rioters detained by the police should be freed, and ignored police attempts to calm the crowd. Police told the crowd to disperse, as the protest was not sanctioned by the city administration, as required by law.  

Suspect in Egor Shcherbakov's killing (Photo from CCTV camera as published by Interior Affairs Ministry)

However, the crowd refused to disperse. Chanting nationalist slogans, protesters attempted to block a road and turned over vehicles and dumpsters, before heading to the vegetable warehouse.
Witnesses said that many of those taking part in Sunday’s riots were members of radical nationalist groups.
Egor’s girlfriend said she was against such protests, since she did not want “interethnic conflicts” to be inflamed. “I know this crime won’t remain unpunished,” she told Moskva 24 TV channel. 
The Russian Investigative Committee on Sunday said that its leading criminalists, as well as the most experienced Moscow police field officers have joined the investigation of the case.

More than 90 people have been questioned in connection with the killing, the Committee added.
Moscow police promised to pay up to one million rubles for information that would help to identify and find the murder suspect.
Some 80 illegal immigrants were also detained as the search for the murder suspect unfolded.
Meanwhile, authorities in Moscow’s Southern Administrative district have decided to set up an operation headquarters to counter illegal migration. The body – comprised of police, federal migration service representatives and voluntary people’s guard – will gather daily.  The new foundation will focus on identifying flats rented to illegal migrants, patrolling streets and organizing sweeps on reports from citizens, the prefecture’s press service told Interfax.

People turn over a kiosk in a vegetable warehouse in the Biryulyovo district of Moscow October 13, 2013 (Reuters / Maxim Shemetov)

Fears of a recurrence of Manezhnaya unrest

Police have closed public access to Moscow’s central Manezhnaya Square and increased presence in nearby streets. Law enforcers used metal fences to cordon off part of the square above the underground the Okhotny Ryad shopping center – a popular place among Muscovites and tourists, particularly on weekends. According to RIA Novosti, the situation in the area is generally calm and so far no aggressive groups have been noticed. 
Earlier, some activists used social networks to urge Biryulyovo protesters to come to Manezhnaya square, which was the site of one of Russia’s worst nationalist riots almost three years ago.
On December 11, 2010, about 5,000 football fans gathered on the square near the Kremlin to commemorate the death of a Spartak Moscow supporter, Egor Sviridov. The 28-year-old was shot dead in a brawl with a group of men originally from Russia’s North Caucasus. However, what started as a peaceful protest turned into a violent rally as soccer supporters and nationalists clashed with police. Dozens of protesters were detained.
Following the Manezhnyaya Square incident, authorities stepped up the fight against extremism and xenophobia.  The government has also toughened punishment for organizing illegal immigration.
However, the situation still remains tense in Russia - home to about 185 different ethnic groups.
Just in July, residents of the south-eastern town of Pugachyov staged mass protests demanding that ethnic Chechens be forcefully removed from the area after a local Russian man was stabbed to death, allegedly by a Chechen teenager. 
Domestic migration has been on the rise in recent years, which often leads to inter-ethnic tensions. Millions of immigrants also come to Russia from former Soviet republics seeking work and better life. 
According to statistics announced in spring by the Federal Migration Service, there are over 3 million illegal immigrants in Russia and 11 million legal visitors. However, unofficial estimates put the number of illegal immigrants at 10-12 million. 

Russian police detain a man after a protest in the Biryulyovo district of Moscow October 13, 2013 (Reuters / Maxim Shemetov)

http://rt.com/news/moscow-nationalists-killing-violence-142/

NWN: There is much more on the link above. :-)

Spanish nationalists rally in Barcelona - 12th October 2013

12 Things You Should Know About The Royal Mail Sell-Off

12 Things You Should Know About The Royal Mail Sell-Off

I was pleasantly surprised by the success of my 12 Things you should know about the Daily Mail slur campaign against Ralph Miliband article, so I thought I'd give the extended bullet points format another shot, but this time on a much more serious subject; the sell-off of the Royal Mail

So here we go - 12 things you should know about the Royal Mail privatisation:

A bit of Royal Mail history

The Royal Mail can trace its history back to the appointment of a "master of the posts" by Henry VIII. It was run purely as a means of establishment communication until Charles I made the service available to the public in 1635. The first designated Royal Mail coaches, featuring Royal Mail livery, appeared in the 18th Century, and in 1793 the Royal Mail Investigations Branch was established, making it the World's first recorded criminal investigations authority.

The first Royal Mail train, between Manchester and Liverpool, began service in 1830 and in 1838 the Postal Order was introduced. In 1839 the concept of pre-paid postage was introduced and this was quickly followed by the invention of the adhesive postage stamp in 1840. The fact that the postage stamp was invented in Britain is the reason that the Royal Mail postage stamp is the only one in the world which does not include the name of the country of origin.

The Post Office was responsible for the UK telephone network from 1912 (when it was established) until 1980 when the Tories hived off British Telecom as a separate company, in order to prime it for the privatisation that took place in 1984.

In 2012 the Royal Mail and the Post Office were divided into separate companies in order to facilitate the sell-off of The Royal Mail in October 2013.

Margaret Thatcher

There has been a lot of debate over whether the current Tory led coalition is the most right-wing UK government in living memory, with many people claiming that the 1979-1990 Thatcher regime was actually more right-wing. In my view the current government are significantly more right-wing than Thatcher for many reasons (Secret Courts, Mandatory Unpaid Labour schemes, privatisation of the NHS, privatisation of 1,000 English secondary schools, absurd exercises in retroactive lawmaking and their fixation with the bankrupt and hopelessly discredited neoliberal pseudo-economic dogma that was new and untested in a democratic environment when Thatcher had her fixation with it), however the Royal Mail sell-off is particularly illustrative, given that Margaret Thatcher absolutely refused to countenance it with the famous and oft quoted statement that she was "not prepared to have the Queen's head privatised".

Public opposition 

67% of the public opposed the privatisation of the Royal Mail, compared to just 20% that approved. When we look at the people that feel strongly about it, 36% of people strongly opposed the sell-off, whilst just a tiny 4% minority strongly approved. [source]

Given the strength of public opposition, the Royal Mail privatisation looks like yet another Coalition own goal for the opposition parties to take advantage of.

Royal Mail workers were also opposed to the sell-off. 96% of postal workers opposed the privatisation in the CWU ballot in June 2013 and a postal strike looks almost certain. The corporate media narrative has already been set on this issue. They will claim that the postal workers are hypocritical for accepting their £2,200 worth of shares (shares that they can't touch for three years, and will be confiscated if they lose their job in that period) and that it will be a bad thing because of the negative effect on the share price!

Undervaluation

Before Royal Mail stock began trading on the 11th of October 2013, the Labour party produced a report that claimed that by pricing the shares at 330p, the government were selling it off at significantly below the true market value.

The Labour analysis showed that the government had undervalued it by £1 billion (about 30%), whilst other city analysts have calculated that it had been undervalued by between £600 million and £2.7 billion (between 22% and 80%).

One of the key areas in which the Royal Mail was undervalued was the property portfolio of more than 2,000 locations across the United Kingdom, which was clearly badly undervalued at just £787 million. The Royal Mail sell-off prospectus lists several sites as beng surplus to requirements, including the 8 acre Mount Pleasant sorting office in Islington, which would be worth over a billion if sold for housing development. It is no surprise at all that the private company will be allowed to keep all of the profits from the sale of property assets that were paid for out of public funds, then flogged off on the cheap.

On the day of the stock market floatation, the share price immediately rose from 330p to 450p, before settling down at around 445p, indicating that the Labour party and the city analysts were right, the Royal Mail had just been sold off at massively below its market value.

In a fair world the incompetent (or brazenly corrupt) Tory and Liberal Democrat MPs that devised this ludicrous undervaluation would be jailed and the two political parties would be forced to stump up the difference between their absurd undervaluation and the real value of the Royal Mail estate. The problem is that we don't live in a fair world, and none of the people responsible for ripping off the public will ever be held to account for their actions.

The absurdity of the Labour stance

In the week before the Royal Mail was sold off Labour adopted the stance, not that it was wrong to sell-off a public institution against the wishes of the vast majority of the population, but that the sale price was too low.

Of course they were right to point out that the government had undervalued Royal Mail and were selling it off on the cheap, however, this price complaint hardly harmonised with the strong sense of outright public opposition.

The reason they couldn't vociferously oppose the privatisation of the Royal Mail on principle, is that Labour themselves had planned to sell it off when they were in government. Even though they have a different leader now, their PR team knew that outright opposition would leave the door wide open for accusations of hypocrisy and political opportunism. Hence their quibbling over the valuation of the stock, rather than representing the views of the overwhelming majority of the public by stating outright opposition to the sale.

Privatisation of the profits

Before the Royal Mail was sold off the coalition government did something that the majority of people don't know about. They separated the Royal Mail pension liabilities in order to keep them on the public books as the company was sold off. This is an absolutely classic example of lumbering the public with the debts as the private sector are handed the profits.

The right-wing press predictably dressed this pensions scam up as some kind of triumph for sound Tory financial logic, with ridiculous claims that the £28 billion Royal Mail pensions portfolio would be used to "pay down the national debt" whilst forgetting to mention that the government would carry the liability for paying the pensions of all of those Posties, for decades into the future.

Here's a quote from an MP that was capable of seeing through such a tansparent scam:

"I fear the government is going to steal £22bn of pension assets, dump the liability as a mortgage on future generations and dress it up as the salvation of the Royal Mail. Their plan to steal the pension assets to help reduce their borrowing figures while taking out a massive mortgage to cover Post Office pension liabilities for 50 years is nothing more than a massive accounting scam … This dangerous plan must be resisted."

The problem is that this opposition was raised by the Tory MP Alan Duncan in 2008 in opposition to the Labour plans to sell-off the Royal Mail and lumber the taxpayer with the huge cost of the pensions liabilities. In 2008 he was deriding this exact strategy as a "massive accounting scam", now in 2013 he is actually a member of the government that has enacted exactly the same scam and hasn't raised the slightest whister of complaint.

Over the next couple of years the mainstream corporate media will probably tell you a hell of a lot about how much Royal Mail profits are up since privatisation, and how much of a wonderful success it's all been. But bear in mind, the old publicly owned Royal Mail had to pay their own pension liabilities, this new company has been absolved of those responsibilities entirely, meaning that the taxpayer is once again left subsidising corporate profits, and the corporate media once again will be ever so keen to sell the public the narrative that it's been a wonderful success for everyone.
  
Only for the rich

Much has been made by the right-wing corporate media of the narrative that this privatisation is allowing ordinary people to invest in the Royal Mail. The problem with this interpretation is that it is absolute cobblers.

Firstly, only 30% of the shares to be made available will go to the public, whilst institutional investors like banks, hedge funds, pension funds and sovereign wealth funds will be sold 70% of the ludicrously undervalued shares. It doesn't matter how you dress it up, it doesn't benefit the public to sell-off an institution that 100% belonged to them, and then only allow them to buy up only 30% of the shares on offer. Why on earth should institutional investors like American hedge funds and Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds get more than double the amount of shares than are made available to the British public? It's not as if there was no public demand. In fact, given that the public share offerings were seven times oversubscribed, there was clearly more than sufficient demand to sell the entire 100% of shares to the British public.

The second objection is that the paltry 30% of shares that were made available to the public were sold off in tranches worth £750. Now, perhaps you're so wealthy that this amount doesn't seem like all that much money, however, to a huge percentage of the population, £750 is an enormous amount of money, meaning that they were completely priced out of the market before the sell-off even began. This means that the only people who will have benefited from the cash windfall from the government selling off public assets at significantly below their true market value, are the already well-to-do.

Another factor is the way that small investors that applied for more than £10,000 worth of shares were left with nothing, whilst the gigantic hedge fund (with close links to the Tory party) Lansdowne Partners Limited was awarded £50 million worth of shares, earning them an instant profit of £18 million when the ludicrously undervalued shares rose in price on the first day of trading.

The biggest privatisation since British Rail?

It has been claimed several times that the Royal Mail sell-off is the biggest privatisation since the hopelessly botched carve-up of the railways back in 1994, however this is pretty debatable.

OK, the Royal Mail sell-off is the biggest direct IPO (Initial Public Offering) of shares in a newly privatised part of national infrastructure since then, but there have been several other privatisation scams that have taken place between 1994 and 2013 that weren't done in the form of an upfront public offering of shares.

One example of a massive privatisation scheme that has passed completely under the public radar (thanks in a large part to the complicity of the press and the Labour opposition) is the fact that half of the secondary schools in England have been privatised, including the buildings, meaning that £billions worth of public property were just given away for free to unaccountable private interests by Michael Gove and his chums at the Department of Education. What is more is that the new private owners that have been gifted all of this public infrastructure (many of them Tory party donors) will receive indefinate subsidies from the government to cover the entire cost of running the schools, plus enough left over to hand themselves ludicrous six figure salaries. The fact that the recipients of all of this public infrastructure and subsidies are educational pseudo-charities rather than shareholders in a newly formed company doesn't mean that this hasn't been a privatisation process.

Another example of a massive privatisation scheme that has passed under the public radar is the carve-up of the NHS. If all of the NHS services that have been privatised in the last few years are summed up, they absolutely dwarf the £3.3 billion undervaluation of the Royal Mail sell-off.

Scotland

The privatisation of the Royal Mail less than one year before the Independence referendum in Scotland looks like a deliberate act of malice. The ruling Scottish National Party and the vast majority of the Scottish public are opposed to the sale, but the Tories have pushed through the privatisation of the Scottish Royal Mail regardless.

The Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond had asked for a moratorium on the Royal Mail privatisation until after the Independence referendum, but David Cameron and his government ploughed on with the plan to sell it off at significantly below its market value.

Alex Salmond has pledged to re-nationalise the Scottish part of the Royal Mail, should Scotland vote for independence in 2014. Hopefully he'll only be willing to pay the 330p a share undervaluation that it was flogged off for, should the stock price be higher come September 2014.

The non-Royal Mail

Here's an objection that actually means nothing to me, but may well carry some weight with those with monarchist predilections:

In the 447 page prospectus for Royal Mail investors it was admitted that the Royal Mail may have to drop the use of royal insignia after privatisation. This could spell the end for the use of the royal E II R royal cypher on post boxes, and the right to use the crown insignia could be withdrawn at any time.

There is one obvious plus side to this story, it is a distinct possibility that Prince Charles' image may never appear on our stamps! Unfortunately this probably won't be because the British public have awoken from their subservient slumber and overthrown the monarchy, but because Charles is under no obligation to let a private firm use his image in their promotional material.

The Madness of Saint Vince

In the wake of the global financial sector meltdown the Lib-Dem Treasury Spokesperson Vince Cable earned himself the reputation as a politician that actually understands economics, with several economically literate observations about the ongoing crisis and for the fact that he had repeatedly raised concerns about the levels of debt within the economy before the crisis happened.
 
Given his background in economics and his reputation for economic credibility "Saint Vince" seemed like the ideal choice for Chancellor of the Exchequer in a coalition government, however the Tories were unwilling to let souch an important office go to the Lib-Dems, so instead the UK was lumbered with the economically illiterate buffoon George Osborne, whose commitment to neoliberal pseudo-economics is only surpassed by his inability to actually understand the the fundamental basics of the economic ideology he promotes.

After being sidelined by the Tories, Vince seems to have been slowly going mad. The early signs became visible when he began promoting his conception of "responsible capitalism" to anyone that would listen, but did so at a time when corporate executives and shareholder dividends were soaring, paid for at the direct expense of productive capital investment and labour force wages. The corporate response to the economic crisis was to hoard cash and to fill executive pockets like never before, George Osborne facilitated this process by slashing corporation tax and deliberately opening up tax-loopholes for the benefit of British corporations, yet "Saint Vince" was waffling away irrelevantly about his utopian conception of ethical capitalism.

By 2013 "Saint Vince" had gone completely mad, the most visible demonstration being his decision to compare the Bank of England to the Taliban because they wouldn't relax the tiny capital reserves they expect private banks to hold in comparison to the amount of money they lend out. Not only was the Taliban comparison insanely disproportionate, the demand that capital ratios be relaxed directly contradicts the "too much debt" stance that won him so many plaudits when the financial crisis hit, because his comments were essentially a desperate and offensively worded appeal for the Bank of England to allow the creation of even more debt!

Vince Cable's fingerprints are all over the Royal Mail undervaluation. In my view ths is hardly a coincidence. The Tories knew that this appalling privatisation scam was going to be extremely unpopular with the public (see the Alan Duncan quote above), so it clearly suited their interests to lumber some naive Lib-Dem patsy with it. Essentially they've got sick of "Saint Vince" and his inconvenient ramblings, so they've shoved the mad old bastard under a bus.

A Tory Own-Goal?

Another admission in the 447 page prospectus is that a privatised Royal Mail could soon cease to provide universal coverage. The withdrawal of delivery services in order to cut costs and boost corporate profits would hit rural areas particularly hard, and we all know that the British countryside is absolutely riddled with Tories.

I know from personal experience that country dwelling Tories are the type of people to get extremely worked up about the fact that their bin collection service has been changed from a weekly to a fortnightly service, so they are hardly likely to react calmly when their postal service is cut off and they're compelled to drive to the nearest town in order to pick up their mail from a Post Office box instead.

Probably the only people with more fealty to the Tory party than the rural farmer, is the investment banker, however, the cancellation of their postal services is one of the things that is likely to drive them to distraction so much that they'll consider either jumping ship to vote for UKIP, or to give up hope and not even bother voting at all.

Conclusion

There's really not much to conclude other than the Tory led government have once again sold off the family silver on the cheap. The public should be apoplectic with rage that they undervalued the Royal Mail so badly in their desperation to sell it off as quickly as possible. But as usual public anger will eventually simmer down and people will forget that the Royal Mail was sold off on the cheap against their wishes. Then they'll queue up to vote for one of the three establishment parties that believe the opposite, that the Royal Mail is better off under the private ownership of American hedge funds, French pension portfolios and Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds than under the democratically administered ownership of the UK taxpayer.

http://anotherangryvoice.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/12-things-royal-mail-sell-off.html