The Euromail Transition
The ever honest, truthful and impartial BBC tells us that our Government are backing a report by Richard Hooper which recommends the partial privatisation of Royal Mail and our postal service.
I suppose I could briefly highlight what may seem like an interesting contrast between the likely sale of a longstanding public service to a foreign postal company by our Government and the fact that Labour are still imagined by many to be against the privatisation of public industries – but then, what exactly would be the point?
We should know by now that Labour and the Left haven’t been interested in nationalisation and the ownership of industry for years. Labour’s supposed clause four moment in which Blair amended the Labour party’s constitution and its commitment to ‘secure … the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange’ was entirely irrelevant.
Decades before that moment there had been a radical revolution in thinking on the Left, since which Leftists have become steadily more interested in bringing about cultural rather than political revolution in order to successfully pursue their social and political agenda. As such the Left and the Labour party haven’t seriously been committed to nationalisation since the early sixties.
Nonetheless, we should still be asking ourselves why our Labour Government has been so openly hasty in seeking to privatise Royal Mail. As usual though, it doesn’t take us long to discover the answer, with unsurprisingly the European Union having had a major hand in this affair – specifically in the form of Directive 2008/6/EC (aka. The European Union Postal Services Directive) which amends Directive 97/67/EC and came into force in EU law (ie. our law) in February of this year.
Under Directive 97/67/EC, incumbent national postal services such Royal Mail were allowed to hold on to a ‘reserved area’ to maintain their positions as universal service providers. However, the recently adopted Directive 2008/6/EC makes clear that the ‘reserved area’ will be abolished and that monopoly providers must be opened up to competition. And like good little Europeans our Government have merely been doing our EU masters bidding.
The supposed purpose of these EU Directives is to introduce competition into the postal systems of European member states as a benefit to consumers. However, as Richard North noted previously back in May:
The postal services directives have exactly the same agenda as all the other so-called ‘liberalising’ instruments, whether they are dealing with energy, rail, telecommunications, or whatever. The intent is to break up national monopolies, not for the sake of it, but in order to recreate then on a European level, under the direct control of the EU commission.
The attack on national monopolies is not an attack on the monopolies, per se but an attack on nationalism – it is an attack on the nation state, an attempt to reduce the power and influence of the member states. As such, the EU has no rooted objection to monopolies – it is, after all, itself a monopoly. Its apparent enthusiasm for ‘competition’ is simply a smokescreen to gull free-market liberals into supporting its deeper agenda.
Our undemocratic and unaccountable government in Brussels continues to busily legislate away on the future of important national services, proving once again (if it were needed) that we do not any longer govern ourselves.
