Postal Services
Bill:
Following the Dictates of the
Marketplace
Today the Postal Services Bill receives its second reading
in the House of Commons. This is a Bill to carry the "restructuring"
of the Post Office further down the road of following the dictates of the
marketplace.
The Bill will turn the Post Office into a public limited
company. The implication of its being a public limited company is that it will
be subject to normal company law. At present the Post Office is a statutory
corporation in what is termed the "public sector". At this stage all
the shares will be owned by the government, or, legally speaking, by the Crown.
However, with parliamentary approval, the government may exchange or sell
shares in the Post Office, in the government’s words, to cement commercial
strategic alliances – in other words, joint ventures or other partnerships
which it considers of commercial advantage.
There are at least two main implications of the Post Office
becoming a plc. One is that its motive will become to be competitive, that is,
to compete both on the domestic market and internationally, with other postal
and carrier contractors for profit. Even its present monopoly of post up to the
value of £1 (or weighing less than 350 gms) is to be replaced by a system
of licensing. The other, which could be said to follow from the first, is that
the Post Office will be allowed to borrow from the private sector to finance
investment, and there is no requirement that the lowest interest rates be
sought. The limit of this borrowing is set at £5 billion.
The government is pointing out that potential competitors to
the Post Office may benefit from the opening up of new markets and new
opportunities for them in the area currently reserved for the Post Office. The
Post Office estimates that the total value of the market in the reserved area
is currently in the region of £5 billion. The total value of the postal
services markets in the Britain is around £8 billion.
The government’s explanatory notes to the Postal
Services Bill say that its reforms are intended to: introduce a more
arm's-length commercial relationship with Government, including the approval of
a five year strategic plan within which the Post Office has greater freedom to
develop new products and services; invest; price commercially; and borrow for
growth investments; create a new independent regulator, the Postal Services
Commission, to promote and protect customer interests, regulate prices, and
promote competition; strengthen consumer representation through the
restructuring of the Post Office Users' National Council; increase resources
for the Post Office company, by more than doubling the proportion of post tax
earnings which the Post Office company can use for investment; convert the Post
Office to a plc to underline the commercialisation of the business; protect the
universal service obligation and uniform tariff; maintain a commitment to a
nationwide network of post offices with the Government for the first time
setting minimum criteria for access to counters' services.
The Post Office chairman, Neville Bain, already commented
when the Postal Services Bill was published that the commercial freedoms
contained in the Bill offered a springboard to meet and beat growing
competition. "We need to turn threats into opportunities and the key is
commercial freedom. That is why this bill is so important."
The "Third Way" type of solution to the Post
Office – that is, neither a nationalised nor a privatised company –
barely masks a move away from the conception that the government, as the
representative of society, should be organising the economy to serve the
national interest and the people’s needs. Instead, as an integral part of
responding to the crisis of the social welfare state, the neo-liberal agenda of
privatisation is being implemented in order to put all sectors of society in
the service of the financial oligarchy and ensure that it is the rich who reap
the maximum profits from these sectors. The global market is being made the
target, a market that for letters and packages, for example, is estimated to be
worth £20 billion a year, rising to £57 billion by 2010. The Post
Office last year already took over German Parcel, for example, one of the
biggest parcel carriers in Germany which operates in thirty countries. The
financial oligarchy will also benefit from the interest on the loans which the
Post Office will take out, underwritten by the government, as another form of
debt interest paid to the rich. Any claims that the government is representing
the interests of the people and the postal workers by "keeping the Post
Office in the public sector" are the promotion of illusions to divert
attention from the actual state of affairs, and are a crude deception. Not only
will the postal service suffer, but there have been suggestions that between
5,000 and 8,000 sub-post offices would become unviable when, as part of the
whole move to promote "commercial freedoms", the government is moving
to automated transfer of benefit payments rather than over the Post Office
counter. Non-urban areas would be particularly hard hit. This is just one
example.
In this situation the working class, including the postal
workers, must continue to defend their interests and the general interests of
society by demanding a stop to the Post Office being used as a means to pay the
rich. They must put forward their own alternative programme for a modern
communications system as part of the programme of the working class to Stop
Paying the Rich – Increase Investments in Social Programmes! The
perspective here is that a modern system should be part of socialist planning
for the economy and to meet the people’s needs in a new society. This is
far from being a bureaucratic demand that the state, set apart from the people,
and running a "nationalised industry", run the Post Office with no
accountability. This scenario, which the "Third Way" supposedly
opposed as being "old left", is not what is meant. The perspective is
that, as part of the working class taking hold of what belongs to them and
placing the assets of the nation under common control, it empowers the people
to decide on the direction of the economy and puts the needs of the people and
their claims on society as the central concern.
