Friday 23 August 2013

A Glimmer of Hope

Conrad Landin writes:

For those of us who constantly despair over the Labour front bench’s failure to fight back against this government’s disastrous neo-liberal programme, today offers a glimmer of hope.

The shadow cabinet are opposing a privatisation programme with more than vague platitudes – and initiating a campaign to save Royal Mail from the profiteers and asset-strippers.

Ian Murray, Labour’s shadow post minister, has initiated a petition on the Labour party website to save the daily delivery and oppose the sale. You can sign it here.

This follows months of sustained campaigning from the Communication Workers’ Union. Meanwhile the non-TUC affiliated National Federation of SubPostmasters has urged its members not to stock brochures advertising the privatisation.

Anyone who doubts the disaster that would follow privatisation need only read James Meek’s account of the catastrophe of postal services in the Netherlands, published in the London Review of Books two years ago. 

But it’s worth remembering that the last Labour government – in the form of a re-incarnated Peter Mandelson – proposed a part-privatisation itself.

That Ed Miliband’s front bench opposes privatisation in principle, and not simply the way it is being handled, should be welcomed.

Now how about a pledge for the next Labour government to reverse the Tories’ privatisation if it cannot be stopped in time?

2 comments:

  1. If you were where you should be and not where the people who were jealous of you kept you, Miliband would already have killed this privatisation by promising to reverse it if elected. No potential buyer would take the risk. I know he is probably going to announce that in his conference speech. But you would have rallied the troops to make him say it months ago.

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  2. Well, I expect that you know whose fault it is that I have not been in a position to do so. But on topic, please.

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