On National Postal Workers Day 2022, a Royal Mail worker of more than 30 years’ service reflects on what 115,000 of his striking colleagues are fighting for – fair conditions, decent pay, dignity in the workplace and community spirit.
I’ve worked for the Royal Mail for more than three decades, and I can remember thousands of special moments.
You’re working with a special type of person, I’ve come to believe. My colleagues are people willing to go the extra mile. They’re funny and kind, thoughtful and creative. They know that the role they play – and the bond they have with the communities they serve – is unique. I couldn’t count the number of charity runs, fundraising concerts and special events that have been organised by my colleagues.
I remember the wartime stories the older boys could tell when I first started; more recently, I can remember the sacrifices we all made during the pandemic, when many of us died keeping the country connected.
Such proud moments can be reeled off by heart, but so can our problems. During festive periods, we are under serious pressure – but other types of stress are creating an incoming catastrophe. Under-recruitment has meant older workers do more while the next generation isn’t coming through to replenish the ranks, at least not where it matters.
Anecdotally, it’s not uncommon to hear of posties having heart attacks, sometimes fatal, on the job – the price of cutting corners. Ask any postal worker and they can tell you stories about ridiculously outdated toilet facilities, broken doors and seatbelts on delivery vans, and serious complaints getting ignored by managers who seem to think they know better.
Bosses and shareholders come first
The money is there to change all this, but it’s not going where it’s needed. In the last year, Royal Mail made £758m in profit and was able to hand out £400m to shareholders. Royal Mail CEO Simon Thompson even gave himself an advance bonus of more than £140,000. But when it came to the workers who created that profit – and during a historic cost-of-living crisis – Royal Mail’s leadership pleaded poverty then offered us a pay rise of just 2%.
Through the Communication Workers Union (CWU), we voted by nearly 100% on nearly 80% turnout, twice, to strike. Instead of recognising the anger we almost unanimously felt, bosses announced they would withdraw from all existing legal agreements with the union and make moves that many fear could mean the derecognition of the union.
Postal workers believe that, for Royal Mail bosses, the wrecking of your Christmas and my wellbeing is a worthwhile sacrifice to turn the company into a bog-standard, Uber-style delivery courier. There, old-fashioned things such as good conditions, decent pay and self-respect on the job can be easily binned, and casualised workers can work harder for less.
This country deserves better, as does its posties
These bosses aren’t people with roots in the industry, and they aren’t sympathetic to the connection it has to our communities: there’s no profit to be made in knocking on your nana’s door when it’s icy, to check on her.
I do my job because I love it. There are things that money can’t buy – like the laughs we gave kids and elderly people with the (frankly bizarre) costumes we tried on during the dark days of the pandemic – and knowing that you serve a wider community and play a useful role in people’s lives.
This is also why we’re on strike. In this country, a tiny number of well-connected people have been making astonishing wealth out of royally stuffing the rest of us for far too long. It feels like everything just gets worse day by day: our bills are sky high, our trains are wrecked, our rivers are filled with sewage, and rent for many is now becoming an existential crisis – and all because a tiny number of people have never had it better.
I, and 115,000 of my colleagues, don’t want to add to these problems by accepting the destruction of one of our few reliable national institutions. This country deserves better, as does its posties. I hope you can back us in our dispute this Christmas.
POSTIES across Britain declared no confidence in Royal Mail boss Simon Thompson today as they prepare for more strike action over pay and working conditions later this week.
The Communication Workers Union (CWU) told the Morning Star that every meeting of workers it had organised unanimously supported the informal motion and condemned the way the privatised company is being managed.
The move came after the union rejected a “take-it-or-leave-it” proposal from senior managers.
For the bargain basement price of $5,000, hackers offered for sale a software flaw in Adobe Acrobat that allows you to take over the computer of any unsuspecting victim who downloads a document from you. At the opposite end of the price range, Endgame Systems of Atlanta, Georgia, offered for sale a package named Maui for $2.5 million that can attack targets all over the world based on flaws discovered in the computer software that they use. For example, some years ago, Endgame offered for sale targets in Russia including an oil refinery in Achinsk, the National Reserve Bank, and the Novovoronezh nuclear power plant. (The list was revealed by Anonymous, the online network of activist hackers.)
While such “products,” known in hacker circles as “zero day exploits,” may sound like sales pitches from the sorts of crooks any government would want to put behind bars, the hackers and companies who make it their job to discover flaws in popular software are, in fact, courted assiduously by spy agencies like the NSA who want to use them in cyberwarfare against potential enemies.
Take Vupen, a French company that offers a regularly updated catalogue of global computer vulnerabilities for an annual subscription of $100,000. If you see something that you like, you pay extra to get the details that would allow you to hack into it. A Vupen brochure released by Wikileaks in 2011 assured potential clients that the company aims “to deliver exclusive exploit codes for undisclosed vulnerabilities” for “covertly attacking and gaining access to remote computer systems.” …
So in a world where, increasingly, nothing is private, nothing is simply yours, what is an Internet user to do? As a start, there is an alternative to most major software programs for word processing, spreadsheets, and layout and design — the use of free and open source software like Linux and Open Office, where the underlying code is freely available to be examined for hacks and flaws. (Think of it this way: if the NSA cut a deal with Apple to copy everything on your iPhone, you would never know. If you bought an open-source phone — not an easy thing to do — that sort of thing would be quickly spotted.) You can also use encrypted browsers like Tor and search engines like Duck Duck Go that don’t store your data.
Next, if you own and use a mobile device on a regular basis, you owe it yourself to turn off as many of the location settings and data-sharing options as you can. And last but hardly least, don’t play Farmville, go out and do the real thing. As for Angry Birds and Call of Duty, honestly, instead of shooting pigs and people, it might be time to think about finding better ways to entertain yourself. Pick up a paintbrush, perhaps? Or join an activist group like theElectronic Frontier Foundation and fight back against Big Brother.
“Whatever you may think of the value of IQ tests it is surely relevant to a conversation about equality that as many as 16% of our species have an IQ below 85 while about 2% …” he said as he departed from the text of his speech to ask whether anyone in his City audience had a low IQ. To muted laughter he asked: “Over 16% anyone? Put up your hands.” He then resumed his speech to talk about the 2% who have an IQ above 130.
Johnson then told the Centre for Policy Studies think tank, which helped lay the basis for Thatcherism in the 1970s: “The harder you shake the pack the easier it will be for some cornflakes to get to the top.”
“… greed [is] a valuable spur to economic activity.”
Royal Mail shares: Goldman Sachs sets price target of 610p
Goldman Sachs has risked a further escalation of the Royal Mailprivatisation row by putting a price target on the shares of 610p despite telling the government that the business should be floated at 330p last month.
Analysts at Goldman said the postal group’s valuation should benefit from an increase in parcel deliveries, despite falling letter volumes.
The investment bank’s 12-month price target of 610p represents an 85% premium on the flotation price, and gave further ammunition to those critics of the privatisation who argue the government sold off Royal Mail too cheaply.
The business secretary, Vince Cable, defended the government’s valuation of Royal Mail on Wednesday after solid results from the newly privatised group sent its shares even higher.
Royal Mail was privatised last month when the government sold 60% of its stake to investors in an initial public offering (IPO).
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Royal Mail shares were up 5% by mid-morning on Wednesday to 559.5p – 70% higher than the flotation price of 330p. Its market value has increased by £2.3bn since the flotation, which valued Royal Mail at £3.3bn.
Operating profit for the six months ended 29 September was £283m, up from £144m a year earlier.
Locked in a cell just outside Heathrow, out of sight from the holidaymakers and business visitors, he can no longer get up off his mattress. He has not eaten in over 90 days. He can no longer stand or see. He struggles to talk.
On Friday, at 8:00 am, he will be forcibly put on board a flight and sent to Lagos, where he says he will be targeted by Islamic terror group Boko Haram. He was due to be deported tonight, but the Home Office has ordered new removal directions. Needless to say, he will be even weaker on Friday.
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In a decision which has no legal, medical or moral consistency given the ‘end of life’ plan, a Home Office doctor has branded Muazu ‘fit to fly’. Yesterday morning, independent doctors visited him as he lay on the mattress in the detention centre and decided the precise opposite. There is a strong chance this man will die when he is deported.
Investment banks to be asked in Commons why sale of asset favoured foreign investors and if float price was set too low
The investment banks tasked with allocating shares in last month’s controversial Royal Mail float face a grilling by MPs over allegations they discriminated against UK pension funds and favoured foreign investors.
Goldman Sachs and UBS led an offer that has been widely criticised for short-changing taxpayers by selling a major government asset on the cheap, after Royal Mail shares immediately soared on the stock exchange and continue to trade at a premium of around 70%.
Those concerns have been exacerbated by the presence of sovereign wealth funds – including Kuwait, Singapore and Abu Dhabi – on the Royal Mail’s share register.
One senior City source, who has worked on major UK privatisations, said: “The Royal Mail was probably a bit cheap, but it is one thing to sell it at a cut-price to UK pension funds … There was a disproportionate amount of shares that went to sovereign wealth funds.”
Senior representatives from Goldmans and UBS will appear in parliament next Wednesday to answer questions from MPs on the business, innovation and skills select committee, alongside peers from JP Morgan, Citibank, Deutsche Bank and stockbroker Panmure Gordon.
The MPs’ concerns over the flotation are echoed by City figures. A top UK fund manager said: “A lot of people were very upset at their allocation, even on day zero before the shares started trading at a premium.
“It may be that the advisers did not take account of the political implications and do as good a job as they could have done.”
A source close to the committee confirmed: “This is something the committee is aware of. It may well come up in the session.”
In the months running up to the privatisation, it is understood that Royal Mail, the government and its advisers were working with a small group of financial institutions in order to get an early idea of how the shares should be priced.
That inner core of investors, which is thought to have largely excluded top UK pension fund managers, ended up with the most sizeable allocations.
MPs investigate whether the £3.3bn sale of shares in the Royal Mail shortchanged taxpayers
MPs investigating whether last month’s £3.3bn sale of shares in the Royal Mail shortchanged taxpayers have summoned City bankers to explain how they put a price on the near 500-year-old firm.
The Royal Mail share price has soared some 70% since 11 October when the government sold a majority stake in the postal service, prompting criticism from unions and opposition MPs that the firm was sold off too cheaply.
It was revealed after the float that four investment banks – JP Morgan, Panmure Gordon, Deutsche and Citi – believed the Royal Mail was worth far more than the price achieved. Representatives of those banks will now have to explain their valuations to the Business Innovation and Skills committee.
Goldman Sachs and UBS, which led the float on behalf of the government, will have to justify their lower valuation. Business secretary Vince Cable and a representative from Lazards will also be questioned. Hearings have been scheduled for 20 and 27 November.
At the time of their appointment a BIS spokesman said UBS and Goldmans had been selected for the sell-off work because of their past experience advising the government on Royal Mail.
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What Britain now has is a blue-orange coalition, with the little-known Orange Book forming the core of current Lib Dem political thinking. To understand how this disreputable arrangement has come about, we need to examine the philosophy laid out in The Orange Book: Reclaiming Liberalism, edited by David Laws (now the Chief Secretary to the Treasury) and Paul Marshall. Particularly interesting are the contributions of the Lib Dems’ present leadership.
Published in 2004, the Orange Book marked the start of the slow decline of progressive values in the Lib Dems and the gradual abandonment of social market values. It also provided the ideological standpoint around which the party’s right wing was able to coalesce and begin their march to power in the Lib Dems. What is remarkable is the failure of former SDP and Labour elements to sound warning bells about the direction the party was taking. Former Labour ministers such as Shirley Williams and Tom McNally should be ashamed of their inaction.
Clegg and his Lib Dem supporters have much in common with David Cameron and his allies in their philosophical approach and with their social liberal solutions to society’s perceived ills. The Orange Book is predicated on an abiding belief in the free market’s ability to address issues such as public healthcare, pensions, environment, globalisation, social and agricultural policy, local government and prisons.
The Lib Dem leadership seems to sit very easily in the Tory-led coalition. This is an arranged marriage between partners of a similar background and belief. Even the Tory-Whig coalition of early 1780s, although its members were from the same class, at least had fundamental political differences. Now we see a Government made up of a single elite that has previously manifested itself as two separate political parties and which is divided more by subtle shades of opinion than any profound ideological difference.
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[T]he Lib Dems did not just “join” the tories, they enabled an economically extreme rightwing administration to assume power and achieve objectives that even the previously most extreme version of rightwingedness would never have even tried. As a consequence:
# over one fifth of the NHS is run for profit (but without (say) a Virgin Health or Circle logo, but under the re-assuring NHS banner so we do not notice or worry;
# Royal Mail shares have been sold cheap to enable and ensure that they are quickly sold-on to the venture and vulture capitalists who (at the last count) recovered over a 500% ROCE from buying and destroying the Dutch equivalent;
# Over £20bn of “other” state services have been handed over to for-profit operations, with over £15bn more planned over the next 12 months;
# 500,000 fellow citizens depend on food-banks for at least three days in every month.
# One million children have since May 2010 entered poverty “the scar that demeans Great Britain”.
# 83% of English NHS hospitals report “critically inadequate” levels of Consultant cover.
None of this would have happened had the Lib Dems more conscience and honesty than a lust for power and chauffeured cars.
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What Britain now has is a blue-orange coalition, with the little-known Orange Book forming the core of current Lib Dem political thinking. To understand how this disreputable arrangement has come about, we need to examine the philosophy laid out in The Orange Book: Reclaiming Liberalism, edited by David Laws (now the Chief Secretary to the Treasury) and Paul Marshall. Particularly interesting are the contributions of the Lib Dems’ present leadership.
Published in 2004, the Orange Book marked the start of the slow decline of progressive values in the Lib Dems and the gradual abandonment of social market values. It also provided the ideological standpoint around which the party’s right wing was able to coalesce and begin their march to power in the Lib Dems. What is remarkable is the failure of former SDP and Labour elements to sound warning bells about the direction the party was taking. Former Labour ministers such as Shirley Williams and Tom McNally should be ashamed of their inaction.
Clegg and his Lib Dem supporters have much in common with David Cameron and his allies in their philosophical approach and with their social liberal solutions to society’s perceived ills. The Orange Book is predicated on an abiding belief in the free market’s ability to address issues such as public healthcare, pensions, environment, globalisation, social and agricultural policy, local government and prisons.
The Lib Dem leadership seems to sit very easily in the Tory-led coalition. This is an arranged marriage between partners of a similar background and belief. Even the Tory-Whig coalition of early 1780s, although its members were from the same class, at least had fundamental political differences. Now we see a Government made up of a single elite that has previously manifested itself as two separate political parties and which is divided more by subtle shades of opinion than any profound ideological difference.
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Britain is an extreme oddity regarding privatisation: nowhere else in the advanced world is there such a willingness to sell everything that isn’t nailed down. Time and again the British public is ripped off and sold out by its leaders.
A few weeks ago, London was the scene of a heist of spectacular proportions. We may never know the full extent of what was stolen, but the indications are that it was anywhere between £1 billion and an eye-watering £6 billion. Although the robbery was carried out in broad daylight, it is unlikely the money will ever be recovered or the perpetrators brought to justice. This is because they were sitting in some of the world’s largest financial institutions – Goldman Sachs, Barclays, Bank of America and UBS – and acting on behalf of the British government.
Their instrument was the undervaluation of shares in Royal Mail, which with the initial public offering immediately soared from 330p to above 500p. The company was sold at £3.3 billion but in J.P. Morgan’s estimation the real value may have been as high as £10 billion. No wonder the IPO was oversubscribed. It was, as TUC General Secretary Frances O’Grady pointed out, akin to “selling five pound notes for four quid.” The biggest private shareholder is now the hedge fund TCI, which snagged 5.8 per cent of the company. The principal victim of this daylight robbery is, of course, the British public.
There has been plenty of public and media commentary – and even a little outrage – at this latest instance of the looting of Britain’s dwindling public sector. After all, even Margaret Thatcher was “not prepared to have the Queen’s head privatised.” The sell-off was conducted in the teeth of sceptical public opinion as well as fierce opposition from postal workers, with 96 per cent opposed in a recent ballot. Billy Hayes, General Secretary of the Communication Workers Union, denounced the manner in which a centuries-old public company, returning regular profits to the Treasury, was “flogged on the cheap for no good reason.” Postal workers have voted for industrial action, seeking guarantees on pay and working conditions.
Missing from most of the discussion, however, is any recognition of just how extraordinary all of this is. Business Secretary Vince Cable may have faced some tough questions about the handling of the flotation but it will blow over. No heads will roll. Asset-stripping of the public sector has become a fact of life. Even among the British left, battered by the serial privatisations of the 1980s and 1990s, there is a certain wearied resignation, a sense of going through the motions in the face of the seemingly unalterable order of things.
We should resist this normalisation. Viewed from an international perspective, Britain is an extreme outlier regarding privatisation. In no other advanced industrial country would quite so flagrant a rip-off have been engineered and tolerated. Nowhere else – not even in the corporate-dominated United States – is there such a degree of nonchalance about ownership and control over vital infrastructure and public services. In the UK, the attitude seems to be that if it isn’t nailed down then it is for sale. Privatisation is increasingly the British disease.
From Pinochet to perestroika
Privatisation has been a prominent feature of the British political landscape for decades, but on the basis of an assumed international policy consensus about how to improve efficiency and economic performance. It is true that, since the 1980s, privatisation has been a key instrument in the toolkit of neoliberal globalisation, enforced from Latin America to Asia to Africa wherever the writ of the IMF and World Bank could be made to run. By 2009, 132 of the world’s 500 most valuable corporations were privatised former state enterprises. But within this neoliberal framework, very few countries were actually prepared to go quite so far quite so fast as the UK.
In a 2002 encomium to privatisation, HM Treasury calculated that, all told, between 1980 and 1996 Britain had racked up fully 40 per cent of the total value of all assets privatised across the OECD. This is an astounding figure. Elsewhere, the only remotely comparable experiences occurred in countries – Pinochet’s Chile and the disintegrating Soviet Union – that were undergoing exceptional transitions and in which the rule of law was basically inoperative.
Chile was the original laboratory. Between 1975 and 1989, under the jackboot of the Pinochet regime and at the urging of carpetbagging Chicago school economists, the country implemented two waves of privatisation. Not merely companies nationalised by Allende but a host of older public concerns – including 16 banks and thousands of mines, real estate holdings and agricultural enterprises – were auctioned off to elites at bargain-basement prices.
Given the accolades afforded the “Chilean miracle” by Milton Friedman and others, it is worth noting that the first wave of Chilean privatisation was a major embarrassment. All but five of the banks and many of the other enterprises failed and had to be taken back into public hands. By 1983 the government-controlled portion of the economy again equalled that under Allende, and critics mockingly referred to a “Chicago road to socialism.” (The second wave of privatisation, beginning in 1985, eventually returned many of these firms to the private sector).
Road tested in Chile, privatisation was then exported out across Latin America and worldwide. Under Margaret Thatcher, Britain served as the most prominent conduit and cheerleader. With free market economists again hectoring from the sidelines (see Thatcher’s correspondence with Hayek), all memory of capitalist mismanagement of factories and mines in the interwar years was forgotten as the commanding heights of the economy – electricity, gas, water, steel, civil aviation, telecoms and railways – were delivered up for auction. It was a massive transfer of wealth from public to private interests, marketed to the people with soothing promises of a shareholder democracy.
As with Royal Mail, the brazenness of the theft was stunning. In his magnificent recent book on public ownership, Andrew Cumbers, Professor of Geographical Political Economy at the University of Glasgow, found “considerable evidence that state assets were sold off at remarkably cheap prices.” Shares in BT jumped from 130p at privatisation to £15 by 1999. Railtrack was sold for £1.9 billion, but within two years had soared in value to £8 billion. The rolling stock company Porterbrook Leasing, privatised for £528 million, was re-sold just eight months later for £826 million, while the other two rolling stock companies were subsequently sold for £900 million more than their privatisation price. The architects of privatisation could barely be bothered to disguise what they were up to. Former Chancellor Nigel Lawson went so far as to state in his memoirs that undervaluation was a deliberate government tactic.
Hugely important strategic considerations were at work, as was evident in the subsequent development of the UK economy. Privatisation not only allowed for attacks on the trade unions but also – together with big bang deregulation – contributed to the build-out of London-based capital markets. The £3.9 billion rollout of shares in BT in 1984, for example, was six times bigger than any previous IPO and four times the size of any other capital-raising exercise in the world at the time. In this way, the privatisations of the eighties and nineties helped secure the City’s continuing place as a world financial capital.
In addition, the sale of 2.5 million council houses at a total value of £86 billion – more than all other privatisations combined – helped generate the real estate boom and (as Stephen Wilks notes) ultimately contributed to the property credit bubble. Revenues from the sale of other public assets – totalling £69 billion between 1979 and 1997 – allowed successive Tory governments to maintain public spending while cutting taxes for short-term electoral gain. Leon Brittan insisted that “people always overestimated Mrs Thatcher’s grasp of economics while underestimating her grasp of politics.”
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What Britain now has is a blue-orange coalition, with the little-known Orange Book forming the core of current Lib Dem political thinking. To understand how this disreputable arrangement has come about, we need to examine the philosophy laid out in The Orange Book: Reclaiming Liberalism, edited by David Laws (now the Chief Secretary to the Treasury) and Paul Marshall. Particularly interesting are the contributions of the Lib Dems’ present leadership.
Published in 2004, the Orange Book marked the start of the slow decline of progressive values in the Lib Dems and the gradual abandonment of social market values. It also provided the ideological standpoint around which the party’s right wing was able to coalesce and begin their march to power in the Lib Dems. What is remarkable is the failure of former SDP and Labour elements to sound warning bells about the direction the party was taking. Former Labour ministers such as Shirley Williams and Tom McNally should be ashamed of their inaction.
Clegg and his Lib Dem supporters have much in common with David Cameron and his allies in their philosophical approach and with their social liberal solutions to society’s perceived ills. The Orange Book is predicated on an abiding belief in the free market’s ability to address issues such as public healthcare, pensions, environment, globalisation, social and agricultural policy, local government and prisons.
The Lib Dem leadership seems to sit very easily in the Tory-led coalition. This is an arranged marriage between partners of a similar background and belief. Even the Tory-Whig coalition of early 1780s, although its members were from the same class, at least had fundamental political differences. Now we see a Government made up of a single elite that has previously manifested itself as two separate political parties and which is divided more by subtle shades of opinion than any profound ideological difference.
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