[Well of course the service will suffer, postage charges will rise, postmen and women will be sacked – that’s what businesses do to make money. Many Tory and Liberal-Democrat-Tory MPs reassure their constituencies that the opposite is true. They’re lying.

Tony Blair’s NEW Labour tried to privatise Royal Mail. Their argument was that there was a deficit in the pension fund. I never really grasped that very poor argument. Any deficit would have be due To Royal Mail or the government dipping into it as promoted by Gordon Brown. The current government argues that Royal Mail needs investment despite it apparently turning a profit. Why not invest some of that profit? ]

Competition will make it impossible for a privatised service not to cut deliveries in rural areas, says Save Our Royal Mail

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Richard Graham, the MP for Gloucester, argued that privatisation would provide the investment needed to compete against the private sector. “I don’t want to save Royal Mail because I don’t think it’s a panda or a tiger,” he said. “I want to grow Royal Mail. I want to see it become a world- beating company. It’s got 150,000 employees. Wouldn’t it be fantastic if it had 200,000 and was running postal services under that great brand all around the Commonwealth?

“It needs to be able to compete against private-sector competitors, and it can only do that effectively if it has the investment it needs to get the technology that the competitors have,” he said.

The panel clashed over how privatisation would affect value for money for consumers. Dunn said Royal Mail had historically kept prices low across the market, but expected a sharp increase after privatisation that would allow its competitors to increase their prices, too. Graham, however, predicted that the new ownership would freeze prices after last year’s rises.

Ben Harris-Quinney, chair of the right-wing thinktank Bow Group, accused the government of “rushing out” the privatisation. “Research in July showed that almost half of the country were not aware of the privatisation of Royal Mail and 65% of those surveyed were against any notion of privatisation,” he said. “There has been no campaign. This has been a Westminster-bubble discussion that hasn’t engaged with the public at all.”

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