When Will They Ever Learn?

Lord Mandelson's plans to part-privatise the Royal Mail are risible. They include a load of hot-air about keeping the Royal Mail publicly owned (one of their election pledges remember) subject to further primary legislation (which New Labour have always had trouble ramming through parliament, I don't think), further bluster about this being the only way to ensure the continuation of deliveries to 99% of homes and vague threats about improvements in industrial relations.

At a time when the tax payer is being asked to prop up all manner of privately owned banks and financial ne'er-do-wells, we have Labour blowing both feet clean off with a Thatcherite cut-price sale. The fact that it is largely New Labour policies that have bought us to this point has, as usual, completely escaped Mandelson and the rest of the dunces that make up the government.

Mandelson criticises the current Royal Mail management - which New Labour appointed. He said the taxpayer couldn't be expected to fund the £8bn pension deficit - duh! Banks, Peter! - remember the banks. Royal Mail is also currently already delivering mail for private firms at a loss thanks to the downstream access arrangements (private companies collect mail from large organisations - private and public - and dump them onto Royal Mail to deliver). Perhaps if they stop subsidising competitors that may help..

And as for the union response! Fair enough, they have stated how outraged they are about "the part-privatisation of Royal Mail" being "electorally unpopular, politically unwise and damaging to the concept of universal service provision." Further they feel that "to break a pledge so recently made undermines the legitimacy of our policy process and raises questions about the validity of other agreements reached".

Well FFS - stop bloody subsidising New Labour itself then! Time after time the unions are kicked in the nuts by this government (as they would be by the Tories but you expect it from them) and every time they keep crawling back with their tail between their legs citing the same old rhetoric about "well, at least they are better than the Conservatives". No they bleeding aren't! They are the same as the Conservatives. And yet you keep sending millions of your members contributions direct to New Labour coffers.

And for what? So that Gordo and the rest of the mob can sell-off the NHS via the back door, impose dodgy databases and ID cards (and the costs) upon every single person, bail out shoddily run banks with squillions of cash to little effect, stir up racial ill-will and then bemoan the consequences and we haven't even begun with the Iraq War, war in Afghanistan, cash for questions, cash for honours, cronie-ism, jobs for the boys/girls, Police ineptitude..... The list is fucking endless.

The best thing the unions could ever do for their members would be to disaffiliate from New Labour and spend the cash on projects that would really make a difference to those very same members, their families and the communities affected by the years of policies pursued purely in the interests of the ruling class - Labour, Tories, capitalists, land-owners, Lords and Ladies: all one and the same.