Tuesday 16 December 2008

Stop! Wait, Wait A Minute, Mr Postman

Standing in the Post Office queue, I saw the front page of the Daily Telegraph. A foreign company is to buy a large chunk of our postal service, and make huge numbers of its staff redundant.

If there were a proper conservative party, then it would be screaming blue murder.

If there were a Labour Party, then there would be metaphorical (but not literal - that is the point of a proper Labour Party) blood in the streets.

Well, now there is.

After all, who the hell else is there?

We either address within our own mainstream political tradition (and thus, by definition, within the constitutional, parliamentary process) legitimate grievances against the intimately related forces neoliberal economics, European federalism, American military-industrial hegemony, globalisation and its multiculturalism, and decadent social libertinism.

Or we leave it to others, who have nothing but scorn for our own mainstream political tradition, and thus, by definition, for the constitutional, parliamentary process.

Which is it to be?

25 comments:

  1. How are you going to pay for it?

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  2. Do get in touch - davidaslindsay@hotmail.com

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  3. Eh? I'm not paying for it myself, sorry.

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  4. David is right, Anonymous 17:11. It would be absurd for a political party to give any indication in public of how it intended to pay for its policies.

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  5. And I'm not discussing such matters with an anonymous person on the Internet.

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  6. Nobody is paying for our policies. We're not all like you, you know.

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  7. Ypou have them anyway, and if people agree than they are welcome to contribute.

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  8. Exactly.

    Policies to order and policy-making processes for hire are the other lot, not us.

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  9. Nobody is paying for your policies? Oh, I assumed you would have some sort of plan to fund them out of general taxation, with a detailed explanation of how much more or less people would be taxed overall, and what existing spending programmes would be cut, and so on. You're telling me you can run the Royal Mail for free?

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  10. Poor Jonty Burgess. Or rather rich Jonty Burgess. Totally unused to being denied his every whim by the common people. How are anyone not tell exactly what he wants to know, there and then. Don't they know who he is?

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  11. That wasn't the question, Sam, which was about the funding of the BPA.

    Jack, perhaps he is Jon, or Break Dancing Jesus. They are both people exactly like that, of course.

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  12. The most profitable postal service in the world is fine as it is Sam.

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  13. So let's keep it that way, and indeed make it even better.

    If it's public subsidies that people like Sam object to, then they should look to the privatised railways, or the City bailouts, just for a start.

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  14. Totally shocking. A great hefty chunk of the profits of a hugely profitable public service to bve given to a private, foreign company. All the please the EU.

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  15. With job cuts accordingly, of course, Steve.

    But would that this were still "shocking".

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  16. How much are Jonty Burgess and Sam Waterson going to make out of it?

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  17. Oh, pots and pots of lovely lolly, no doubt.

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  18. If the Germans can do it better, why not let them? The idea of a delivery office being run with any kind of efficiency is frankly a rather attractive one.

    Besides, I know some Germans, and they're simply lovely people.

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  19. What's wrong with people making money?

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  20. No, Sam's right. I meant "pay for its policies" in terms of overall tax and spending plans - not in terms of funding the party. I assume the BPA is already perfectly well funded.

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  21. I strongly support public subsidies (normally it means I get criticised by right-wingers, but today it seems everyone's assuming I'm a banker). But the money needs to come from somewhere.

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  22. Nothing, Matthew. Within certain limits, of course.

    But what's wrong is hiving off part of a hugely successful public service and giving it to a private company, just because the EU says so. Even Margaret Thatcher ruled out privatising the Post Office. (And the railways.)

    Han, because it's ours, and it works very well indeed as it is, or at least as it used to be until recently. In Thatcher's words, "You can't privatise the Royal Mail, it's Royal". Quite. And on that among other bases, you can't flog it to Abroad, either.

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  23. Sam, the Post Office subsidises the Treasury, not the other way round. Let some of that money be spent on things like saving rural Post Offices, rather than, say, wars.

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  24. "the Post Office subsidises the Treasury, not the other way round"

    Sadly, that's no longer true - it used to be, but it isn't any more. I wish it were, but there you go.

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  25. It depends how you add it up.

    Back tomorrow afternoon.

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