“It is our view that the Labour government has masterminded the unnecessary imposition of competition, backdoor privatisation and the undermining of all postal services.” said the CWU….a union affiliated to Labour!
The National Audit Office has released its report into the partial privatisation of Royal Mail.
The Privatisation of Royal Mail
The Department was successful in floating Royal Mail. But its approach was marked by deep caution, the price of which was borne by the taxpayer.
The BBC has given this headline status and has been giving the lions share of coverage to the critics, Labour in particular….we do get defenders of the share price but they do not balance the critics.
That aside there is one glaring hole in the BBC’s coverage gives Labour plenty of airtime to say things like this:
The government “botched” the privatisation of Royal Mail, short-changing taxpayers by hundreds of millions of pounds, by selling shares too cheaply, Labour has said.
….and yet, once again, as with mine closures, and the economic crash, the BBC conveniently forgets the history and context behind events…when they are uncomfortable and embarrassing for Labour….or so it seems.
Chuka Umunna was given free rein by Sheila Fogarty (13:09ish) claiming that ‘Labour would never have privatised Royal Mail……it doesn’t make sense…the government has privatised the profits and nationalised the debts’
He went on….‘The taxpayers have been disgracefully shortchanged and are owed an apology…ultimately the person who is responsible is the Prime Minister and he should apologise.’
[Well…when we get an apology from Gordon Brown for his ‘ultimate responsibility’ for the economic apocalypse he left us with perhaps Cameron might consider one.]
However….‘Labour would never have privatised Royal Mail?‘…em… they had every intention of doing so.
Not only that but their imposition of a disastrously strict regulatory regime brought Royal Mail to its knees….from a profit making, pension paying success, it became an economic disaster zone having to go to government with a begging bowl.
And there’s always room for Labor’s Margaret Hodge to add her ‘independent’ assessment on the BBC:
Margaret Hodge, chair of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), said the sharp rise in Royal Mail’s share price since the sale showed “the department had no clue what it was doing.”
What about that glaring hole in the BBC’s coverage though?
Labour now says that Royal Mail was sold off too cheaply…..the Public are shortchanged and Cameron must apologise.
Would that be the same Labour party that had already, in effect, privatised the Royal Mail for free, giving its most valuable assets to its private competitors at prices, enforced by Labour’s Regulator, that meant Royal Mail made huge losses as it was forced to deliver competitor’s mail at below cost.
What did the bosses at Royal Mail think?
“regulation gone mad”…the new price regime would “choke the company” and the universal one-price service.
What did the postal worker’s union, the CWU, think?
“It is our view that the Labour government has masterminded the unnecessary imposition of competition, backdoor privatisation and the undermining of all postal services.”
You might think that was relevant to the debate today….but not a single mention on the BBC today of this rather embarrassing history for Labour.
Or that Labour ‘masterminded’ putting 60,000 postmen and women on the jobs scrapheap…..
Modernisation – Royal Mail is needs massive upgrading and staff cutting
It’s already happening under public ownership. Over 60,000 jobs have been lost from Royal Mail in the last five-six years with more disappearing as machinery and delivery revisions are brought in.
Labour had already privatised Royal Mail…it allowed private companies to asset strip and cherry pick the best bits of Royal Mail’s business for peanuts….putting it and the universal service in jeopardy and destroying a once solvent pension fund…now a very hefty charge on the public purse.
And Labour claims the sale was rushed to get in ahead of industrial action…so that would be strike action by the CWU union, affiliated to Labour, which forced the ‘premature’ sale of shares at a low price…costing the tax payer, god bless ’em, millions? Hmmm..dodgy argument there I might have thought.
So who is responsible for ‘giving away’ Royal Mail and ‘nationalising the debts’?
First and foremost it’s the Labour Party in reality.
Just a shame the BBC isn’t doing its job properly and challenging their own narrative rather than allowing them to grandstand as the defenders of the Public Finances….LOL!
For a more balanced and indepth look try this site for a view on the privatisation:
Taking Stock…Royal Mail’s IPO in HIndsight
It’s always a bad idea to compare ‘independent’ sites with the BBC…they are all too often far better at providing indepth information and analysis….you realise just how bad the BBC can be despite the massive resources.
The most amazing thing is that time after time after time politicians react with surprise when they find the civil service / public sector is incompetent!
If they started off from this position and were amazed when they actually did something correctly then they wouldn’t get into this mess!
Instead we get the usual platitudes about civil servants being hard working when they’re not, or that they are ‘committed’ what ever that means other than fully committed to left wing domination of everything!
Another issue with Royal Fail was the appalling levels of discrimination which went on under Liebour, and the fact that Liebour did nothing about it, proving that ‘equality and discrimination’ are only meaningless bully words. One third of all cases at the equalities tribunal were involving Royal Fail, and the equalities commission began an investigation into management practices, the first one since the 1970s!
Just shows how quickly the bully words can be dropped when left wing dogma is threatened.
Something the BBC never tells us for any stock market story is the volume of trading.
Putting that simply, the Roll-Royce in the dealer’s window might be priced at £100,000 but nobody is buying whereas the supermarket’s 8 pints of milk for £1.80 might have the stuff flying off the shelves. There is no market when no-one is buying.
As one of your links says:
“It’s clear that the initial rally was driven by one or two large investors building up significant positions, and that took the stock above the 550p mark relatively rapidly,” said one ECM banker. “Technicals drove it to that level, but since then the stock has levelled off. Those long term investors are now sitting on their shares, so trading hasn’t been particularly volatile.”
The same source quotes UBS Bank as saying that the stock is over-priced, but then if no-one is trading then the price has no reason to rise or fall.
They also never tell you that the EU orders the privatisation of Royal Mail & the electric , gas & railways ,in the name of competition . The bbc & labour are talking out of there f***ing arses as usual .
. . . and on it goes. On BBC 24 Norman Smith standing on Westminster Green turned to the Conservative MP and opened his “interview” by stating “this was a complete balls-up wasn’t it” – or words to that effect.
Of course, in the real world, identifying the flotation price for an IPO is difficult. FWIW when I was involved in this kind of thing the outcome was always either over-subscription or a complete humiliation: there was never an instance where all the offered shares were applied for with no surplus applications. That’s not to say that, since the offer price was suggested by the lead underwriter, the shares weren’t generally at the low end of an acceptable price range but, again in my experience, the board of the company being floated generally had enough common and business sense to know what was reasonable and what wasn’t.
Of course, in this case the decision makers were public sector geniuses so I suspect the offer price was lower than it would have been in a “normal” IPO. Accordingly, the NAO might have some justification for suggesting that the offer price could have been higher. OTOH, the NAO is not exactly packed to the rafters with people of business ability so I’d take its strictures with some scepticism. Needless to say, the NAO’s announcement is balm to the BBC. After all this was a successful flotation of a nationalised outfit which was opposed by organised labour and where the advisory banks made a fair slug of money for doing their job. It’s a signature condemnatory event in BBC-land with or without the NAO’s involvement. No wonder the BBC’s making a meal of it.
Anybody remember Qinetic and the scandal of its underselling to the scientists and involved quangocrats under John Reids Labour after Blairs second win in 2001?
Or what of the Rover flog off -again to Labours preferred Chinese bidders just before the 2005 election-Patricia Hewitt to blame?
This in no way condones the useless treacherous Cable…who should be sacked in any case…it just shows what Labour do when in office…their venality, incompetence and utter lack of knowledge in “protecting the taxpayer”.
And how the BBC lets them get away with writing their own history-allowing Labour to remember nothing of their own greedy evil.
Heck, The Post Office is not what it was. It was stuffed with Union ‘not my jobs’ and employs a huge number of part-time ‘seasonal staff’ over Christmas period. The most profitable part of the post office was ‘ParcelForce’. Letters cost more to deliver than the stamp. Even DHL and FedExpress use cheap ‘Post Office ‘ to deliver that Letter. You can be sure that the price of a stamp (you will have to print them yourself on ebay) will be TEN times what they cost now. And of course BBC’s own Lord Tony Hall will sit on the ‘board’ (in case anything unfortunate should happen to the BBC). Maybe he knows it’s days are numbered…
http://www.go-on.co.uk/about/board/paula-vennells/