The latest news on privatisation is that the Czech may be in the mail but we’ve all been conned – and who would have thought a big privatisation scandal would break the day after This Site repeated that the public wants services re-nationalised?

The BBC is reporting that Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky’s EP Group is to take over the Royal Mail in a £3.6 billion deal – that hinges on a large number of guarantees and promises:

The government will retain a so-called “golden share” that will require it to approve any major changes to Royal Mail’s ownership, HQ location and tax residency.

EP Group will also have to maintain the one-price-goes-anywhere Universal Service Obligation (USO), which currently means it has to deliver letters six days per week, Monday to Saturday, and parcels Monday to Friday… for as long as it owns Royal Mail.

The USO is currently under review, with Royal Mail suggesting to regulator Ofcom that reducing second class deliveries to every other weekday would save up to £300m a year and give the business “a fighting chance”.

The conditions agreed by EP Group include keeping the brand name and Royal Mail’s headquarters and tax residency in the UK for the next five years.

It has also reached an agreement in principle with unions that include workers getting a 10% share of any dividends paid out to Mr Kretinsky, as well as the formation of a workers group that will meet monthly with the directors of Royal Mail to give employees a bigger voice on how it is run.

The takeover of Royal Mail’s parent company, International Distribution Services (IDS), is expected to be completed early next year. When debts are included, the deal values the company at £5.3bn.

Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds said while it was up to shareholders to approve the deal, the agreement the government had reached meant the takeover “will be a good deal for the UK, be a good deal for the people who work for Royal Mail and a good deal for customers”.

What utter bilge from a Labour Party trade secretary!

Let’s have a bit of context, courtesy of Another Angry Voice:

In 2013 the Tories and Lib-Dems cooked up an outrageous scam to flog Royal Mail off at a fraction of its true value, making instant £millions in unearned profits for a select band of hand-picked preferred buyers when the artificially lowered initial share price soared.

The new owners then cashed in by hastily selling off massive chunks of the Royal Mail property portfolio for literally hundreds of millions.

Křetínský’s is already plotting to roll out post office lockers and scrap universal deliveries, leaving people in the countryside stranded if they don’t have the means to visit their post office lockers in nearby towns.

The government reckons it’s tied Křetínský down to certain guaranteed levels of service for the next five years, but what happens if he claims “too big to fail” and demands bailouts to meet the conditions? And what happens when the government’s five year ban on asset stripping, price-hiking, and service degradation is up?

AAV goes on to list the privatisation-based failures of successive UK governments since Margaret Thatcher started the boulder rolling downhill in the 1980s:

A Czech billionaire now owns our national mail system.

The government of France owns all of our nuclear power stations.

The rest of Britain’s energy supply is owned by a hodge-podge of profiteering corporations, including Daniel Křetínský’s EPH group.

Our major airports have been flogged off to a Spanish conglomerate.

Our most famous car marques have all been flogged off to overseas owners, including the Chinese communist government (MG).

England’s water supply is owned by a toxic mix of profiteering corporations and overseas governments.

Britain’s steel industry has been downsized, degraded, and resold so many times since privatisation that what’s left of British Steel is the plaything of a communist Township and Village Enterprise for a region of China that virtually nobody in Britain will even have heard of.

Our schools are being run by a bunch of profiteering academy spivs who treat the nation’s education budget as their free cash machine to fund their bloated executive salaries and their dodgy rip-off supply contracts with friends, family members, and their own damned companies.

And Keir Starmer’s just been over to kiss the arses of the Saudi tyrants and offer them first dibs on even more British infrastructure and services.

Let me reiterate: the vast majority of the UK population don’t want this. We want public services back in public ownership, with any profits going to service improvements rather than the bank accounts of greedy shareholders.

But there are few representatives in Parliament who even care; they are too busy getting their noses in the trough, grubbing around for high-paying consultancy jobs at the firms that have bought the nation’s assets.

We could try replacing those MPs with some who would actually make a difference…

Ah, but that would require more of us to actually think about who we vote for, rather than simply choosing a red or blue rosette – and who’s got time for that? Right?

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