THE Coalition’s Business Secretary, Cable, told MPs last week in the House of Commons that the Bill to privatise the Royal Mail ‘will maintain the universal postal service at its current level. This will mean six days a week delivery.’
However, his Department has admitted that there is a provision in the Bill to drop the guarantee to deliver mail six days a week, adding the rider that ‘no changes would be proposed without Ofcom undertaking a review’.
The CWU general secretary Billy Hayes has responded to this admission, which undermines Cable’s assurances, by stating that Cable’s legislation ‘allows the service to be split up and sets the framework for a two-tier system where rural Britain becomes a second class citizen’.
Earlier, Hayes stated that, ‘The government is misleading the public and pulling the wool over taxpayers’ eyes. . . The Bill allows for government bail-outs if private companies struggle to provide the postal services we currently enjoy without hand-outs. That’s another bad deal for the taxpayer.
‘While the government makes grand statements about efficiency and protecting services, their Bill sets the pace for damaging and ending the universal one-price service, downgrading services, higher costs to the taxpayer and more post office closures.’
The Royal Mail service is already being slashed to pieces in preparation for privatisation, which is expected to bring with it 30,000 sackings, putting 25 per cent of the remaining staff onto temporary contracts, along with the mass closure of mail centres.
In fact, even before privatisation, the Royal Mail management is planning to have just one mail centre in London and to close the East London and Nine Elms Mail Centres, along with the Rathbone Place sorting office, destroying over 3,416 jobs.
Mount Pleasant is to be the only mail centre in London.
In fact, Royal Mail is asset-stripping and looking to force through compulsory redundancies to prepare the way for the privateers.
It is now crystal clear that the Royal Mail is to be plundered and destroyed to allow the privateers to enrich themselves.
The Bill contains provision to provide state aid for the privateers if they get into difficulties, repeating the experience of the British Rail state-subsidised privatisation.
The CWU must now take action.
Labour attempted to privatise the Royal Mail in its last year of government, and the Labour opposition will support this privatisation measure.
There is no parliamentary way to halt the privatisation of Royal Mail.
The CWU must recall its conference and adopt a policy of indefinite strike action to halt the privatisation, and for the formation of a public sector workers alliance, to fight the threat of privatisation and the 500,000 sackings that are coming, with an indefinite general strike to bring down the coalition.
This is the only way to defend the Royal Mail and to prevent the growth of massive unemployment on a scale much bigger than the 1930s and the 1980s under Thatcher.
The weasel words of the reformists that the workers must wait for five years for a general election to get rid of the coalition must be rejected. There will be nothing left!
Only a workers’ government that will expropriate the bosses and the bankers can defend services and jobs.
Decisive action must be taken now!