Stop the Royal Mail sell-off!

Submitted by martin on 11 March, 2009 - 10:31 Author: Gerry Bates

The Postal Services Bill, under which the New Labour government plans to sell off 30% of Royal Mail, was brought to the House of Lords for its second reading on 10 March.

The legislation should come to the House of Commons within the next two or three months. The Government seems intent on ramming through the privatisation by using Tory support for it to overwhelm a probably sizeable rebellion by Labour MPs.

Although New Labour, like all other capitalist governments, has suddenly been convinced of the need for public ownership of banks in order to save the economic system from disaster, it is still a devout privatiser for public utilities and services. The full-strength market-worship of a few years ago has been discredited; but whatever modified doctrine the capitalist governments are fumbling towards, on present indications it will include spraying a blast of market competition at workers and users in all the public services.

With neo-liberalism discredited, this is an issue on which the Government can be defeated. Postal workers have huge industrial power. Mail volumes are declining, but only very slowly, and a postal strike still has a big and rapid impact on the capitalist economy.

Moreover, the CWU already has — and CWU leaders are publicly recalling the fact — an agreed policy to ballot members on disaffiliation should privatisation of Royal Mail take place. A ballot would probably go for disaffiliation. If, as is the case under the structural changes that Blair and Brown have imposed on the Labour Party, the CWU’s affiliation gives it the “privilege” of pumping money into New Labour funds in return for literally nothing — not even the right to submit a motion to Labour Party annual conference — then that “affiliation” has little more than the name in common with the old union-Labour link.

Disaffiliation will cost an already cash-strapped Labour Party £1 million a year.
In 1996, when the Tories tried to privatise the post, the CWU drove them back by a public campaign which saw postal workers out leafletting and collecting signatures on every high street. A similar campaign now would get similar public support and could build up the momentum for industrial action against privatisation.

From the back page

Unfortunately, CWU leaders are fumbling too. In 2007 the leadership of the CWU postal section chose a battle with Royal Mail bosses over pay and restructuring, seeing it not just as a routine skirmish but as a showdown over the future of the industry. When the Royal Mail bosses and the Government responded with a harder line than the CWU postal leaders expected, they crumpled, let the action dribble away, and eventually negotiated a very mediocre deal.

The knock-on effect from that setback seems to have weighed heavily in the CWU leaders' decision before Christmas to call off a planned strike over Mail Centre closures.

Since the Government announced its plans to part-privatise Royal Mail last October and November, the CWU has been slow to react. Even on the level of briefing and prodding anti-privatisation Labour MPs, it did not really get going until recent weeks. Before then it left much of the political side to the soft-Blairite lobby group Compass.

The union has now called a national demonstration against the privatisation, for Saturday 14 March, but it is in Wolverhampton, which will inevitably mean lower attendance and publicity than a demonstration in London. (Assemble 11.30 at the corner of Greencroft and Arthur Streets).

Some branches are campaigning, and there is talk in the union of industrial action over 16,000 threatened job cuts, but so far there is nothing like the level of mobilisation of 1996. There is still some time to turn this around, but not much.

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