I was pleased to see that the Green Party conference
unanimously passed the motion to stop the privatisation of Royal Mail
and support the campaign by the union the Communication Workers Union (CWU) to
fight the sell-off.
I worked for BT for twenty years, joining just a few years
after it was privatised in 1984 which was the first of the public utilities to
be sold off by the Thatcher Tory government, but was followed by many more,
some under the subsequent Labour government, in an ideological process of
robbing the poor to the benefit of the wealthy.
In the time that I worked at BT it did change a lot, going
from 250,000 employees down to something like 80,000 by the time that I left,
and I think even lower now. When I started working there I did think that there
was a plausible argument for privatising a business where thousands of people
had to wait six months or more for a telephone connection in an industry that
was obviously going to expand because of technology.
Of course the government at the time could have made that
investment themselves, but that was the whole point, take ownership off
everyone and concentrate the profits generated, which amounted to billions of
pounds a year, into the hands of those who could afford to buy the shares.
Despite share issues to staff and some allocations of shares to ‘small
investors’, the ownership largely fell into the hands of the big investors. And
the drive to increase share price superseded everything else, including
service.
Asset stripping became the policy in BT, with over a hundred
buildings and land sold for development in London alone and Royal Mail is well
endowed in property, but selling it off is bound to have a more acute effect on
customers in the mail trade, with longer distances to collect registered mail
etc.
Customer service has actually gone down in the privatisation
years. Who hasn’t despaired of the call centre customer service experience? Who
can be bothered to examine the bewildering array of choice of providers and
their myriad ever changing tariff deals?
One cultural thing that did linger in BT up until the time I
left, was a unionised one, with around 80% membership amongst sub management
grades and even a decent proportion in the lower ranks of management. This
cultural attachment to the union, is even stronger in Royal Mail than it is (was)
in BT, and I fully expect a huge vote in favour of industrial action, and a
really solid response from the rank and file.
I was a CWU rep in my time working at BT, so I mixed with
activists from the postal side of the union and I know that they are not going
down without a fight on this. But all may not be lost.
Big political beasts have tried to privatise Royal Mail like
Michael Heseltine and Peter Mandleson, only to be thwarted by a campaign of
resistance, not only from the CWU, but from Tory MP’s and now probably Lib Dem
MP’s in rural constituencies, where inevitably the service will get worse and
more expensive, despite assurances to the contrary. It could well cost some of
these MP’s their seats, so I do not discount a U-Turn on this policy by the
government.
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