LIbDem Sell-off of Royal Mail will damage Highland Communities

Come the 2015 elections, the Highlands will remember it was a LibDem minister who sold off the Royal Mail. 

The Highlands already suffer from poor quality broadband compared to many other parts of the country.  Despite the Coalition’s promises, the programme to deliver high speed broadband to rural communities – a programme reliant on a privatised BT – is well behind schedule.

Now the LibDems will put at threat a basic service that’s served us well for generations.

We are assured that a privatised Royal Mail will be obliged to honour the universal delivery obligation to deliver mail to any household in the UK.  There are no such guarantees about the timeliness and cost of such deliveries.  We have already seen how the privatised energy and train companies can raise tariffs and fares pretty much as they like, maximising profits instead of service standards.  

How long will it be before a privatised Royal Mail cuts the frequency or range of delivery in rural areas?  Pick up your mail from the “local” service point anyone?  And only on Tuesdays and Fridays, of course……..

Despite all the fine words about “freeing up management to seek sources of private capital to invest” this is a policy driven by right wing, free market, political ideology.  To make the sale attractive to its friends in the City, the Coalition has taken on the Royal Mail’s £200m pension debt, clearing the decks for big business to squeeze more cash out of an already profitable operation.  

Nationalise the debt, privatise the profit.

The Highland LibDem MPs had no mandate to support a wholesale privatisation of Royal Mail in their 2010 manifesto.  But it’s a LibDem minister, Vince Cable, who is driving through this legislation, with the enthusiastic support of Inverness MP Danny Alexander at the Treasury.

We can of course look forward to seeing CWU and other trade union members who stand up against this sell-off to protect their jobs and our mail services being lambasted by the media as “left wing luddites”.   They deserve pubic support and I, for one, will be proud to stand alongside them.

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