I'd rather it remained a public service too, but generally there's no law that dictates private has to be bad.

Seriously, its like no one remembers how much worse things were with the GPO. A case of rose tinted spectacles me thinks. British rail was a joke too. Public ideally should be perfect, bit it never is.

Three letters : Gee Four Ess.


Well it's kind of irrelevant how bad it used to be because how it used to be doesn't currently affect anybody and can't be changed either way. The important questions are how bad/good is the service now, how is it going private likely to change/improve the service and does the sale price represent good value for the taxpayer?

Looking at the each of those three questions, I can't see any answers that say privatisation is a good idea. I appreciate the notion that the status quo is not always best, but surely the point is the public have to gain something for relinquishing control of an asset which is currently showing a profit? What are you or I going to gain from this? £3b is a drop in the ocean of government debt, they could make five times that back in a year if they just told the HMRC to get their finger out. It's not changing the state of the nation at all. Why is the post office being sold after it's been fixed, other than for dogmatic reasons?

You 'fix' a 1976 Ford Cortina with a couple of rubber bands and it will be a good enough car to get you home. But it will break down again tomorrow. That's about how fixed the Post Office is right now.

Just as with the RBS fiasco, the headline number attached to the profit/loss that the taxpayer might make is of negligible importance. What matters most is whether the asset in question can do more to boost its contribution to our overall economy in one set of hands or another. And that question can only be answered with reference to a business plan, which is not available as yet.

By long tradition, corporate turnaround strategies in the UK public sector are never successful. Running the PO at arms length as a state owned enterprise is an option, but SOEs usually cause more problems than they solve (I'm waiting for Amnesia to one day read about the real state of China's economy, which is dominated by them - he's going [LIFTED] hay bale sized bricks of concentrated panic).

But I will say one more time, if we chose to sell it off for the highest possible price, that would amount to an active decision to kill the post office off over the next decade or two.

Right now, if sold off cheap to somebody with a commitment to increasing its long term value and sufficient resources to invest long term with a coherent plan, the PO has a good chance of becoming a successful, if leaner organisation. But the only institution that would invest in such a vehicle that way is a pension fund. Which is why it would be better to give the Post Office away, for nothing, to its own pension fund.

which isn't happening. So remind me again why selling it off is a good thing?

How much more effort do I need to put into saying I don't think it's all that good than my original comment?


As a publicly owned service, the RM is headed for long term oblivion. It's simply a fact that it is a logistics business with a series of impossible obligations to service. It has too many properties, too many people, and too few letters to deliver. It's too easy for private sector competitors to build parallel infrastructures and take away from it that business which they want to have, leaving RM with the dregs.

You have been focussing on its current level of profitability, but that took a giant bailout to achieve. Before long its profitability will again vanish as the stresses mentioned above build into new unaffordable obligations, mostly of the pension variety.

Politicians cannot be relied upon to reform this sort of entity because they are only in their jobs for the short term and the problem needs a long term fix.

Politicians have two other unhelpful habits. One is that they will say anything at any time to make other politicians look bad - it's a dreadful habit but they can't help themselves. A huge state asset with long term perils that is in need of coherent reform simply can't get that in this country. In Scandinavia, where competing parties are capable of working together because they aren't all tribalist monsters like you and those you so viscerally hate, this would be achieved. But with Britain's tradition of pointless political vitriol it will not happen. Our politicians will block sensible reform because people like you encourage them.

The other unhelpful political habit is a tendency to wait until the political time is right to do a thing. There will be entire years where the government doesn't dare announce a contentious policy. During those years, the opposition, knowing that it is unavoidable, will frequently announce the policy in question, but only in terms of their commitment not to do it. Eventually they will do it, but that combination means that every important reform will arrive 5 years late.


The Royal Mail is close to the point where it becomes smarter to announce a plan to wind it down than to attempt further expensive reform. If people don't want that to happen, then very serious pragmatism is required. Not the usual politically charged bluster that brought it to this state.

selling the Royal mail off will result in the Royal mail just becoming another privately operated courier company
nothing more nothing less, which is a very sad thing to happen to the Royal mail ...