Post Office Demise Spells End For Labour?

The Crewe byelection has delivered a massive defeat to the Labour Party and many newspaper pundits are making comment that it spells the end for the Labour Government after being in power since 1997.

Interestingly for the CWU, one of the main items of proof that it is not only the Crewe results, but that of the tragedy that is unfolding within the Post Office and the closure programme decimating the services to many rural areas, not to mention city and town centres.

This at least is the major tenure of an article in this weeks Guardian Newspaper written by Seumas Milne, May 22nd.

In it he accuses the Government of residing over the “creeping privatisation of Britain's postal services”, and the Labour Parties sudden love of all things private:

“For more than a decade, Tony Blair and, puffing slightly to keep up, Gordon Brown have always insisted that the only test for their policies is "what works". That has been the theme tune of their ever more enthusiastic embrace of public service privatisation and commercialisation. Not for them the pickled nostrums of the past: if the corporate world could deliver the goods, it had to be given the freest of reins.
The farce of their claims couldn't have been more clearly demonstrated than in the liberalisation and creeping privatisation of Britain's postal service. Far from "working" or delivering the goods, the corporate-skewed opening up of the market is progressively destroying a publicly owned network at the heart of Britain's social and business life. When New Labour came to power, the Post Office was an effective public monopoly handing over more than £100m profit a year to the public purse. Public and political support saw off successive attempts by the Tories and, more tentatively, Tony Blair to privatise what had become Royal Mail.”

Continuing his point, the article goes further:

“But eight years after New Labour began exposing the network to private competition and two years after Royal Mail's 350-year-old monopoly was finally abandoned, the postal service is in crisis and the universal service which guarantees delivery of mail anywhere in the country at a single price is in peril. A devastating independent review for the government this month found that liberalisation had only benefited big business, brought "no significant benefits" to consumers or small businesses, and created a "substantial threat" both to the future of Royal Mail and the universal service.”

Carl Webb, CWU North West Regional Secretary’s view of the Guardian article is that Seumas Milne “has it spot on!”

His article adds further analysis regarding other threats to the Post Office saying that, “Of course, the growth of the internet and years of under-investment in mechanisation have also had an impact.."

You can read the whole article in the Guardian’s on-line edition here

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