29th March 2002

At last we know exactly what the prime minister meant when he met Berlusconi and called for a more flexible Labour policy for 40,000 jobs in the Post Office are to go in the biggest privatization deal since the railways were sold off by Mrs Thatcher.

The main victims of this decision will be in the rural areas where the delivery of letters costs so much that it can only be afforded by cross-subsidization from the profitable business in towns made possible by the monopoly the GPO has always had and that monopoly is now to be broken to allow big business to cream off the profits and leave the GPO with the loss-making end, which will inevitably endanger the universal service on which we all depend.

And the closure of thousands of rural post offices will be a body blow to outlying villages and undermine the quality of life there, in a way that no-one who does not live in the country can possibly understand, and this after the arguments by the Countryside Alliance in defence of hunting as if killing foxes was more important than being able to rely on a regular daily delivery of letters.

The justification is that the Post Office makes a loss but that is because the government has deliberately by denied it the increase in postal charges necessary to keep the service going, an increase that is long overdue since the cost of postage stamps has increased at a rate thirteen per cent below inflation over the years, giving Britain the cheapest service in any country in Europe, except for Spain and Portugal.

Moreover, when the GPO did make a profit it paid over two billion pounds of that profit to the Treasury, and also had to foot the bill for the disastrous failure of the computerization of counter services, forced on it by the government.

What has been announced today is a death sentence on the British Post Office imposed by a government that does not believe in the idea of public service and is totally committed to the dominance of market forces which is a pre-condition of British membership of the Euro, enforced by Brussels.

And, now we hear that even an ancient Oxford College seems to have followed suit by accepting students, not on the basis of their academic qualifications, but after someone has come up with a big donation no doubt designed to maintain the 'high levels of scholarship' of which the university regularly boasts.

And to prove that he leads a business friendly government the prime minister intends to force the taxpayer to fork up millions of pounds to reward the investors who gambled on buying Railtrack shares, got their fingers burned and now demand compensation.

This is the price we have to pay for privatization because the City has told the government that private money will not be made available for the so-called public-private partnerships unless those who put their cash can be assured that if it all goes wrong they will guaranteed against loss.

Financial problems do not apparently arise when it comes to finding money for wars which is why we can easily afford to send more British troops to Afghanistan to fight America's battles there and prepare for a major attack on Iraq without even securing the support of the United Nations, and the taxpayers will be asked to pay for the missiles and bombs that may kill women and children in Kabul or Baghdad.

But, even in the field of defence, privatization is still going ahead as we hear of redundancies in our Naval Dockyards are being pushed ahead to allow private companies to make a quick buck there too. Mrs Thatcher may not be fit enough to make any more public speeches but her voice can still be heard loud and strong from No 10 Downing Street and her ideas still dominate New Labour.

Meanwhile, hoping to benefit from the public disappointment with New Labour, the Tories at their spring conference decided to ditch their own connection with the Thatcher years by moving back to the old idea of One Nation Toryism, associated with the 'Caring and Sharing' image pioneered by Disraeli, Churchill, and Harold Macmillan.

What is interesting about that U Turn is not that the Tories have really become more progressive but that their own focus groups and spin doctors have told them that such a switch is the best way of winning public support when the next election comes, and they have done so because they have picked up the public mood more accurately that our own public relations experts in the Millbank Tower.

The prime minister is still caught in the time warp of the early eighties when the Tabloids were screaming at the unions and calling for tax cuts but public opinion has moved on and the so-called Third Way is seen as a throw back to the politics of twenty years ago.

The fact that half a million demonstrators turned up in Barcelona against the European Union Summit and over a million went on the streets against Berlusconi in Rome is an indication of the public hostility to all these policies and gives the lie to the myth that young people are not interested in politics for it is the politics of the international elite who mastermind the evils of Globalization that they reject.

When political leaders who have come to power through the process of voting have to hide behind thousands of police to protect them when they meet, something has gone seriously wrong and if we want to see it put right we shall have to do it ourselves. What Britain needs is a Labour Government.

29/3/02