The same old skulduggery

The private sector has had its beady eye on our postal network for decades, but it has been repulsed every time - so far.

Postal workers and the people they serve - everyone in Britain - have looked at the case for privatisation and they don't like what they see.

In the wake of the economic shambles created by the privately owned banking sector, the old propaganda about private-sector efficiency and managerial know-how is no longer swallowed so easily.

And the record of private ownership for those essential industries that we used to own collectively is far from clever.

Water rates in the days of public ownership used to be so low that they were included in the general rates bill, but we were told that European Union insistence on cleaner beaches meant that only the expertise of the private sector could do the job.

And do the job the privateers did, but it wasn't the job that they'd been asked to do.

Their main occupation was flogging off land adjacent to waterways to the housebuilding industry, bringing cash riches and guaranteeing shareholder heaven.

Such was the income of the privateers that many exported their profits overseas to buy up other industries and guarantee alternative profits streams for their owners.

Similar skulduggery affected the gas and electricity companies that won the great privatisation franchise sell-off.

Their imaginative and forward-thinking executives simply sacked thousands of workers, forcing those lucky enough to still have a job to work harder, boosting shareholder dividends.

As for the railways, even arch-privatiser Margaret Thatcher hadn't believed it possible to privatise the rail industry successfully - and she was right.

Rail privatisation has been a disaster for passengers, staff and taxpayers, but it has been a regular little goldmine for the private train operating companies.

And how has it been done? By structuring government subsidies, which are higher now than they were back in the days of "inefficient" publicly owned British Rail, to build in private profit.

And if that results in worse services, staff job losses and ever-rising fares, well that's the price of embracing the cutting edge of private-sector efficiency.

Throughout the Labour government, privatisation zealots such as Gordon Brown and, most recently, Peter Mandelson tried various ploys to persuade the CWU, postal workers and consumers either that privatisation was good or that what was on offer wasn't really privatisation.

Despite the usual right-wing media consensus that this shoddy, corrupt profiteering ploy was really the Holy Grail of modernisation, people remain opposed.

As with the railways, the electorate wants its Royal Mail in public ownership as it always has been.

And it doesn't want as Royal Mail chief executive someone like Moya Greene, who acted as the grim reaper of privatisation in Canada, overseeing rail privatisation, airline industry deregulation and ports commercialisation.

People in Britain have seen through the lies of the Tory and new Labour con artists who projected the supposed superiority of the private sector.

The CWU is ready for industrial action to defend public ownership, but this battle must also be taken up other unions and communities that will suffer from this latest attempt to turn public assets into private profit.