The Royal Mail Is Not For Sale

Martin Kelly writes:

The likely advance of the BNP in Thursday's election to the European Parliament will no doubt produce 'a good day to bury bad news'.

Such as a further development in Lord Mandelson's plan to privatise the Royal Mail.

In the economic histories that will be written 100 years from now, it will hopefully be recorded that wherever it has been practiced, privatisation has resulted in nothing but a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, directly analogous to the pillage of Church property during the Dissolution of the Monasteries, or the seizure of common lands through enclosure; the latest manifestation of the powerful's age-old desire to grasp everything in sight, including the property of the poor, while justifying it with the lie that it's for their own good.

That the process of enclosure could not have proceeded without 4,000 separate Acts of Parliament should once and for all give the lie to the absurd notion that government should play no part in business. For our lawmakers, abetting the aims of business at the peoples' expense has too often been business as usual.

As far as the Royal Mail is concerned, the justification that's being used is the deficit in its pension fund. This deficit would, in all likelihood, not have arisen had the pension fund's managers not had blind faith in the impossibility of an ever-rising stock market, over-exposing the beneficiaries' assets to the vagaries of equities, an act in which they were probably encouraged by the dumb Tory law on 'contribution holidays'. Instead of a single employee of the Post Office having to suffer a reduction in their pension, or uncertainty over their entitlement, why not bankrupt the trustees, realise their property and put it in the pension pot? Why not bankrupt Fatty Clarke, the last known survivor of the government that created the contribution holiday still sitting on the Conservative front bench? He bears more responsibility for the decline in the Royal Mail's pension fund's fortunes than the average postman - accordingly, it is only proper that he should take a proportionate share of the consequences.

Given that Fatty Clarke has continued to prosper while the cattle who do the work face uncertainty, such an outcome seems both fair and just.

Such seizures as enclosure and privatisation derive from the evil will of otherwise inconsequential and second-rate men to disrupt unity and sow disharmony, while turning a coin in the process. One is not sure whether Lord Mandelson can be characterised as evil - one hopes not, for all men must be capable of redemption - but that he is thoroughly inconsequential and thoroughly second-rate should be considered truths beyond debate. The figure in British history that he seems to resemble most closely is Thomas Cromwell, a thoroughly second-rate fixer and pillager whose luck eventually ran out.

Lord Mandelson's absence from any forum in which he might be called upon to engage with the British public, such as Question Time, leads this writer to conclude that he either considers himself to be above such matters - arrogance is the perpetual trademark of the second-rate - or else he is genuinely frightened of what might happen if he did. As far as the first conclusion is concerned, obviously he has nothing to fear from us; the track of recent history has been that we have much more to fear from him, a very second-rate economic ideologue, than the reverse. As far as the second's concerned, well, one can only say that he has nobody to blame for that but himself.

Put him on Question Time. Let him justify what he wishes to do to the people. Hopefully the sight of seeing him try to squirm his way out of the dilemma with which he will be presented - the British government's absurd contention that the only way for the banks to be saved is for them to be nationalised, while the only way for the Post Office is for it to be privatised, a piece of cant that an idiot child could see through - will make classic television.

Having outsourced their critical capacities, all ideologues are, by definition, second rate. Their views deserve no consideration, for they proceed from the absurd conceit that their ideologies have all the answers to whatever questions might be asked of them. That this has proven to be a universal falsehood again and again and again bounces off them like a pop-gun cartridge off a tank. Ideologues of whatever hue, from the atheist kind who describe themselves as 'Brights', to the absurdly overblown, over-rated and thoroughly second-rate neoliberal ones who infest the mainstream media (no accident of history), to the economic ideologues, the most laughable and second-rate of them all if only because they genuinely believe that everything they do is justified by reason, have developed the historical habit of considering themselves as being an intellectual elite. They are nothing of the sort. Their blind acceptance of others' ideas, whether by acts of will or through the none-too-sophisticated form of brainwashing that passes for university education, are, from the highest to the lowest, well-credentialled intellectual dross.

When the theory fits the facts, the theory is correct - but when, as with so-called 'economic shock therapy', the facts must be made to fit the theory, the theory is wrong. As I wrote some months ago, the repudiation of shock therapy by the British and American governments through the bail-out of their banking sectors should mean that Jeffrey D. Sachs should never be awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics, or whatever that particular bauble's Sunday name might be; one Buggins who'll just have to keep waiting his turn.

Privatisation was critical to shock therapy. As shock therapy in the round will go into history's twilight, so too will privatisation. The processes of the past 30 years are not irreversible. There is no need to listen to second-rate ideologues going on and on and on about the 'inevitability' of 'globalisation', a phenomenon about which more has probably been written than read. It is in our hands to reverse it.

Nothing frightens the powerful more than a unified people. Just as the never-successful attempt to destroy the unifying influence of Catholicism in England was a fig leaf for the powerful's looting of Church property, so too was privatisation never anything but a similar legally-sanctioned appropriation of public wealth justified by nonsense about the rights of the individual. This rape of the people can stop. The cant and nonsense spewed out by the right-wing economists, most of them imbued with the fanaticism of the hardest of hardcore fanatics, is just so much hot air. The Friedmanite neoliberal agenda is not the only program that works - but it's the one most likely to turn the people against each other. The atomisation of society, of unity, of collective spirit - these are not consequences of Friedmanism; they are its ends.

If the British people were to stand together and shout , 'The Royal Mail Is Not For Sale!', the world would shake. We would then see our government in its true colours - whether it would cave, or turn our guns on us. These are times which enable the holding of great hope - let us see if they are times which also demand great courage.

Say it soft, say it strong, say it loud, say it long -

THE ROYAL MAIL IS NOT FOR SALE!