Swiftly They Move

The business section of today’s Daily Mail remarks upon a sell-off of Royal Mail taking place as early as April of this coming year. The paper also briefly details a list of potential buyers including TNT, Deutsche Post and the US Federal Express.

This merely points out the true inevitability of the situation – that the future of Royal Mail is in ‘privatisation’. It does not matter what we think about this; whether we agree or disagree with ‘privatisation’, it is not up to us to decide any longer – and it has not been our decision for quite some time.

As I previously highlighted, the European Union Postal Services Directive 2008/6/EC, which amended the previous Postal Service Directive 97/67/EC has decreed that ‘privatisation’ will indeed occur. Furthermore, as Directive 2008/6/EC clearly states:

Member States shall bring into force the laws, regulations and administrative provisions necessary to comply with this Directive by 31 December 2010 at the latest. They shall forthwith inform the Commission thereof.

Therefore the ‘privatisation’ of Royal Mail from its position as majority universal service provider must occur by 2011. In targeting April for a sell-off, our Labour administration is simply doing as it is being told by our EU masters in the Commission rather than following the advice of any policy groups or reports.

I should also point out that even if the Conservative party were against the ‘privatisation’ of Royal Mail (which they are not), then it wouldn’t make the blindest bit of difference. Our continued membership of the European Union confers upon us the necessity of obeying its legislation which is now part of our own law.

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.

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Goodbye Den Dover

The theft of half a million pounds by Den Dover MEP is really quite trivial when you consider that for the 14th year running the European Court of Auditors have refused to clear and sign off the EU’s accounts.

I do not condone Den Dover’s clearly deceitful and illegal actions but I think that the issue of his personal theft from the system in comparison to EU waste in general is very minor.

However, with our modern media being what they are you can guess which story they will spend most column inches discussing.

Ignoring The Elephant

Something which never ceases to fascinate me is the way in which entire debates on UK politics can be held without so much as a mention or in-depth look at the incredible influence that the European Union has on a particular issue.

A few weeks ago I attended a debate on Devolution at the University of Bath. To my amazement the EU was actually mentioned relatively quickly, but then unsurprisingly was rapidly ignored and framed in such a way that it appeared to be an external irrelevance to the issue of devolution of powers – rather than as it actually is a fundamentally important element.

Now, interestingly enough we had someone on the panel from an organisation called Unlock Democracy – what appears to be a seemingly unremarkable group claiming to be interested in increasing democracy in Britain. Their representative was a member of its Bath branch called Tim Williamson.

Unlock Democracy evolved from Charter 88 and is an organisation which has its distant roots in the Communist party of Great Britain, so you can already guess what such an organisation’s views may be. However, I suppose its history is in some respects by-the-by – what is more important is the type of organisation that Unlock Democracy has now become.

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