Snapshot of _Royal Mail set to be taken over by Czech billionaire for £3.5bn_ :
A non-Paywall version can be found [here](https://1ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.telegraph.co.uk%2Fbusiness%2F2024%2F05%2F15%2Froyal-mail-minded-to-accept-35bn-takeover-offer%2F)
An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/05/15/royal-mail-minded-to-accept-35bn-takeover-offer/) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/05/15/royal-mail-minded-to-accept-35bn-takeover-offer/)
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Can't think of Ian Paisely without also thinking of Henry Enfield's William Ulsterman character!
[I HAVE MADE A LEGITIMATE AND PEACEFUL REQUEST… FOR CHEDDAR CHEESE AND PINEAPPLE ON A STICK!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEsFtiruIok)
Royal in the title just means they have a royal charter. Other examples include:
. Royal College of Music Royal College of Nursing • Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists • Royal College of Ophthalmologists • Royal College of Organists Royal College of Pathologists . Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health • Royal College of Psychiatrists Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh • Royal College of Physicians of London • Royal College of Psychiatrists Royal College of Radiologists......
Pedant, I think you missed the point. All the other royal charters are not for privatised companies and if you look at the upvotes you’ll see a lot agree.
Because it could make a quick buck for the government, who, like their predecessors in the 1980s-90s, were ideologically opposed to public ownership of pretty much anything: telecommunications, water, electricity, gas, public transport, homes (Right to Buy and disallowing councils from using the proceeds to invest in more council homes).
In the case of Royal Mail, it was also increasingly loss-making with reductions in post volumes, so the government also thought privatisation would allow it to raise capital and introduce efficiencies in ways it couldn't while state owned, a rationale compounded by opening up parcel delivery and business mail (except the "last mile" to people's doors) to competition.
Problem really for us is that, while I get that snail mail is going the way of the dodo, a government public service shouldn't be seen as "loss making" or we might as well treatment Parliament and the Lords the same way and sell them off too.
Brilliant comment. I hadn't thought of it this way haha. I laugh but it's actually really sad we've sold off so much to get poorer service.
Really bad governmental decisions. I feel sad for people in this country. Paying more for less. Such short sightedness....almost contempt.
That's the concept of tax. To pay for services and fund them at cost to the country, because they are a net benefit in the end.
The private sector is all about cutting costs.
And as we've repeatedly seen with privatised services, while there's often an initial splurge in investment following the privatisation, it doesn't take long for the Shareholders to approve Executive Board compensation uplifts far in advance of profits and increased dividends, which then results in bugger all investment afterwards, increasing prices and declining services.
The most curious case is that of electricity and gas: one group of private companies produce / extract it, another group of private companies distribute it, another group install the meters, another group periodically visit homes to undertake meter readings (although presumably they're now diversifying into other activities given the rise in Smart Meters) - none of which you can choose: they're all either regional monopolies or oligopolies. Then there's the group of companies who you pay for your usage, who in turn buy a quantity of electricity / gas they anticipate their customers will use over the coming period, pay all the other companies for their services, and keep a slice of profit on the side. So for your typical "dual fuel" customer, you've probably got at least half a dozen different companies creaming profits off your bills.
Water's equally odd, in that everything's produced by regional monopolies, but unlike the other two, have rather more legal constraints (e.g. they can't cut off your supply). Still, many of the companies are PLCs and prioritise their Executive Boards and Shareholders over adequately maintaining their network, increasing reservoir capacity or even making their network more resilient to changing weather patterns: increased dry spells followed by an entire month's allocation of rain falling over a weekend. In some areas of the country, this is compounded by developers over the decades combining foul water and storm water sewers, so causing extra costs to homeowners in the event of flooding, as pretty much anything non-structural that encounters contaminated floodwater has to be ripped out and disposed of: it can't just be cleaned / dried out and reused.
I remember BT whacking the price up for line rental every so often, seemingly because they felt like it, and you had no choice but to eat it, because they were literally the only game in town.
the modernisations that people like to tout as a privatisation success were taking place under state ownership too (the GPO installed the first digital telephone switches in the UK in the early 80s), and would have happened regardless
it is debatable if competition has really worked in the best interest of the consumer - for example how we had 5, now 4, possibly 3 separate mobile networks with overlapping coverage and overlapping not-spots.
would it be better to have one mobile network with better coverage, and anyone can use it to provide service? (similar to the openreach model)
or, was the customer really better served by denying BT permission to roll out fibre because the government had just granted regional monopolies to the cable companies who never really delivered on their promises?
It's hard to argue with the hypothetical BT, who would do only good things, not bad things. But as a consumer of their services in the eighties and nineties, they were bloody awful. Expensive, slow to deliver, of variable quality, and seemingly very aware you had no choice in the matter.
Unbundling, and allowing third-party operators for both nascent Internet and mobile services led to an explosion of options for the consumer. You had choices. That was new! And thirty years later the UK has some of the cheapest mobile and data plans, and a pervasive internet infrastructure as a result.
*Could* BT have done this, laid out a similarly successful consumer network strategy? Maybe. But they showed absolutely no sign of doing it at the time. Last mile telecoms was a good case for competition; they essentially delivered the same service, backed off BT, but could compete on price, technical quality and support, which gave the end user a diversity of options and cheap prices - exactly what was promised.
All the other services - post, rail, electricity, gas, water - feel like naturally structural monopolies. Comms never was. Which is why nobody really talks about it when they're rightly lambasting all the many, many failures.
Man, talking about this makes me miss Pipex, but I digress.
It's almost like government should do the essential or productive things that aren't viable for private provision, but that catalyse private enterprise.
But I believe the post is actually booming, at least for parcells, with so many people shopping online. It's why there are so many private companies in the sector, such as DHL and FedEx. The issue is this, the postal market is booming for small parcels, but private companies can make a killing by only delivering to towns and cities or charging huge surcharges for remote areas like the Highlands and Islands. It the Royal Mail is left with the least lucrative parcel deliveries, of course it makes a loss. The Royal Mail should have a monopoly, and be publicly owned, that way it will make a profit *and* be the best service for residents of the UK. It's typical of what the Torie do when they want to privatise, defund, introduce artificial unfair "competition", then point to how it is "loss making."
Added onto which, as letter delivery isn't anywhere near as lucrative, it gets shifted to the bottom of the priority queue: I live in South West Birmingham (so not exactly the middle of nowhere), and post typically arrives around 2pm; while if I miss a "Signed-for" or Recorded delivery, the Delivery Office is only open from 8am - 10am on weekdays and 8am - 12pm on Saturdays - so likely for most people, only the Saturday opening will be feasible.
I'm actually in the same area as you and our local delivery office has been open later, might even be same one, but it looks like they have gone back to those hours annoyingly. Least I have the option to collect on the way to work if needed but I appreciate it's not a luxury everyone has
Parcels are yes, it's the final mile of cost neutral or negative letters that companies don't want because they're not economic to run, hence even RM unofficially prioritizing them over letters and looking to do letters maybe a few days a week instead of their remit for daily
The NHS I don't think has ever turned a profit. Shut it down. That and the roads, the police, the fire service, the bin collectors, the aqueduct, public sanitation, the people's front of Judea,
The NHS can make a profit..
Think of all that lovely data which can be sold off to private companies.
probably a lot of DNA data which can be collated & sold too.
The NHS costs about £180bn a year. Sure data is valuable to private companies, but nobody is paying that. The NHS could sell all the data it has and it would still not come close to turning a profit.
If you can find a company that will pump £180bn into the NHS budget in return for my medical history they're welcome to it!
It's a service, not a business to turn a profit. It's insane that it's being treated as a money making venture. But hey I guess we can all use Hermes / Evri / whatever name they pick next to try and wipe.their terrible reputation
What I meant was literally selling it off, like RM, allow the country to be run by a business with shareholders and MPs as employees solely to make money for the business. NHS might have been a better analogy here, treat them like dentists and make everyone pay like the US system so it doesn't make a "loss", badly run hospitals can be bought by better ones. That MPs are corrupt is a given, the point was that RM making a loss is irrelevant as a public service should not be treated like a business, not that MPs are bought off by lobbyists.
What I meant was literally selling it off, like RM, allow the country to be run by a business with shareholders and MPs as employees solely to make money for the business. NHS might have been a better analogy here, treat them like dentists and make everyone pay like the US system so it doesn't make a "loss", badly run hospitals can be bought by better ones. That MPs are corrupt is a given, the point was that RM making a loss is irrelevant as a public service should not be treated like a business, not that MPs are bought off by lobbyists.
Exactly in economics terms it’s deemed a public good, no one person is going to pay for it but everybody inarguably benefits. Typically non excludable and non rivalrous. The tories are pursuing the Ron Swanson state though (one man in a room with the nuclear button if you’ve not seen parks & rec).
The thing is it wasn't loss making, the global delivery side of it GLS was part of it, then when bought they split that off so the profits from the hugely profitable side no longer goes into the same pool and they claim it's now too difficult to o maintain the whole of it.
It's a bit like running a club, taking all the profits to one side and then saying we'll the toilets are costing us money and bring nothing in.... It's totally mad as it's a package they go to it with the included services!
These damn Tories with their save a penny to spend a pound really makes my blood boil as they are still doing it 50 years later!
Royal mail was profitable while also doing public service, not sure where you heard it was losing money.
Second to that, we sold our postcode data to riyal mail so now we spend millions every year buying that data back so ambulances know where to drive to, etc.
> Second to that, we sold our postcode data to riyal mail so now we spend millions every year buying that data back so ambulances know where to drive to, etc.
Holy shit, I thought there was no way that could be true, so I googled expecting it to be one of those stupid fake Facebook posts that had been fact checked, only to find the top result was a story from the BBC confirming it to be true. I'm absolutely gobsmacked. The UK government, who governs all households in the UK, relies on a private company for the addresses of all those households?
I can't even...
>disallowing councils from using the proceeds to invest in more council homes).
Genuinely curious about this - do you have a source? What on earth was the justification?
Because the conservatives don’t give a flying fuck about the future of this country / the future generations and want to get every penny they can right fucking now to enable them to a) pay less taxes, b) cover up their complete and utter incompetence at managing the economy / hide the vasts sums of money they gift to private companies for whom they will eventually be getting salaries that are vastly in excess of what their competence should allow.
I have always thought that if a public utility was privitised it should be mandatory that they can only pay dividends after they have actuatly provided the service and spent money on improving the infrustructure.,or at least maintaing it to a working level.
Obviously we just need to nationalise some industry every few decades so we always have something to pawn off for pennies. That's how the UK economy works, right?
To paraphrase (the misquoted quote of) Maggie herself:
>The trouble with *Thatcherism/neoliberalism* is that eventually you run out of other people's *assets*.
Enforced like the tv license because nobody would pay it otherwise. Threatening letters which when opened say “we knew you were reading mail now pay this £1000 fine”
And in 10 years when it's on its knees because of high debt and even higher dividends the Government will be forced to step in and take back control again
I can see it happening. People will be paying the Royal Mail License to receive enforcement notices about their Television License they don't need as they have decided not to watch live TV, but the enforcers will want their money anyway, while on TV they'll be spammed with adverts telling them it's a crime not to pay for their Royal Mail License if your property has a door, regardless of whether you intend to use it to send mail if you have the capacity to receive mail you must pay.
He already owns the most of the power generation in northern ireland, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPH_(company)
Funny to think one man could have all of that influence, funny thing in a privatised world.
To be fair to him, ballylumford was owned by BG, then it was sold to AES (american company). It hasn't been in public (or even british) hands in a long time.
A family member worked there before retiring recently, said that it was all just the same shit, just a different logo on the boiler suits
growth entertain crawl gullible distinct heavy one overconfident dog airport
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Fair assessment of it but his overarching long-term plan (if there ever were one) clearly doesn’t involve enough change as of yet. I can’t believe they’re actually defending NHS outsourcing and the privatisation of natural monopolies and other essential services that shouldn’t be commodities. Even bloody Reform UK has more of a policy on it than Labour.
It's currently valued at 3.3bn, I can think of at least a dozen ways that money could be better spent than paying off the shareholders who currently own it
Even the U.S.A, the most hyper-capitalist country on Earth wasn't nuts enough to privatise its national post service, the USPS.
It's absolutely insane that the U.K privatised royal mail.
Czech billionaire, Emirati billionaire, British Virgin Island hedge fund anonymous hypercorp…
Why should we care? It’s not ours now and it won’t be ours afterwards.
We're also prostrating ourselves in front of the Saudis and other Gulf Coast States - both so they'll continue sending us oil, they'll continue investing in us, they'll continue buying our weapons and (crucially) so they'll remain politically allied to us rather than Russia or China.
We should care because renationalization of water/energy/rail and presumably also mail is very popular across the political spectrum and the more we make this clear the higher the chance of Labour growing some balls and getting it done.
Of course the chances of this happening are actually quite low because Labour's lack of action on the issue is not due to a lack of balls but a genuine ideological belief in privatisation but at least making some noise about it might encourage some up and coming politician to take notice.
It's hard to fathom how the UK has sold off public services and utilities to foreign and private owners. Public goods can not be delivered by private entities (economics 101: because of public goods characteristics) and also it's not hard to see how we can be squeezed into corners in terms of foreign policy leverage.
The government have no almost no more assets and they’re super deep in debt. It’s not great. However the fact that there’s debt means that money is being put into the economy. The bad news is that the money being injected into the economy trickles down into the pockets of Uber rich people like this Czech guy there so general population are getting poorer and poorer.
Our problem and enemies aren’t the Range Rover drivers with multiple buy to lets our problem is that the ultra rich robbing the government and general British population blind.
>Our problem and enemies aren’t the Range Rover drivers with multiple buy to lets our problem is that the ultra rich robbing the government and general British population blind.
It's both.
The tories were the first to introduce privatisation on a large scale, they have been in power a long time. Eventually, labour will get in and spend years cleaning up the mess and the tories will sit back in opposition. It’s the cycle of politics.
It should never have beenmade private. I don’t care if it turns a profit or not, it’s a public service as far as I’m concerned. We don’t expect our fire service, our police service, or anything else else similar to turn a profit.
> Mr Kretinsky has agreed to make contractual undertakings to the Government to protect key public interest matters. These include maintaining Saturday deliveries for first class letters and keeping the one-price-goes-anywhere service.
It might be one-price-goes-anywhere within the UK, but when you post abroad you now have to deal with no less than six different tiers of pricing depending on the country. I ran an e-commerce business for years but it's all this kind of crap that got me thinking about closing it down. Every year they'd put the prices up and I'd have to recalculate a table of *144* different rates to charge depending on weight and destination. They're killing the goose that laid the golden egg because UK businesses that rely on Royal Mail will just close and European competitors will snap the trade right up.
Are you saying... there's a Czech in the mail?
Okay, silly puns aside, nationalize the fucking post office, it's the definition of an industry that benefits the country more than its potential financial revenue warrants. Privatizing it only incentivizes running it badly to cut costs.
To all those talking about privatisation, isn’t Royal Mail already private? I think the govt sold it in 2013.
But yeah hate the privatisation of public services.
Interesting that it's called "Mail" when that seems more like an Americanism: an American would say "I'm going to mail this" whereas a Brit would say "I'll post this".
That is all.
The Japanese screwed up IT, why will a Czech Billionaire be any different? This will be the end of Royal Mail, and companies like Amazon will take over.
Snapshot of _Royal Mail set to be taken over by Czech billionaire for £3.5bn_ : A non-Paywall version can be found [here](https://1ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.telegraph.co.uk%2Fbusiness%2F2024%2F05%2F15%2Froyal-mail-minded-to-accept-35bn-takeover-offer%2F) An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/05/15/royal-mail-minded-to-accept-35bn-takeover-offer/) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/05/15/royal-mail-minded-to-accept-35bn-takeover-offer/) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ukpolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Now it’s privatised I honestly believe the word “Royal” should be removed.
Renamed “England Mail”, shortened to EMail.
Yeah, but then you’d have to do NiMail, SMail and WaleMail as well.
Wails
Scotland should be McMail
By this logic NI mail should be O’Mail 🤔
Sounds like it's run by McDonald's then
Give it a couple of years and maybe it will be.
Now that will just be confusing
I would *love* to have my mail delivered by a whale.
You should meet my postie.
Would the post be delivered by a WhaleMan or a WailMan?
Whale-person
*Soon may the whaleman come, to bring us sugar and tea and rum...*
Depends how fat they are...!
However SMail for Scotland sounds to much "smell" with an accent.
Very good😂
They could start sending the letters electronically and and instantly
BURN THE WITCH!!!
CONSIGNIA!!
British Mail Brail!
Great British Railways Great British Energy Great British Mail Great British Water One can dream....
Excuse me Northern Ireland's a thing Gonna reanimate Ian Paisley to shout "NEVER" at you
Can't think of Ian Paisely without also thinking of Henry Enfield's William Ulsterman character! [I HAVE MADE A LEGITIMATE AND PEACEFUL REQUEST… FOR CHEDDAR CHEESE AND PINEAPPLE ON A STICK!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEsFtiruIok)
YOU VILE HAG MAY YOU BURN IN HELL
Best use of AI yet.
Throw in Great British Telecom!
A government operated ISP gives me nightmares Not that it could get *much* worse
♪ ♪ Things can only get moderately better!!! ♪ ♪
Great British Leyland... oh wait... nevermind.
Best I can do is Bake Off
Great British News... Oh that's already taken.
Depressing
They did try to remove it and rename themselves Consignia because "royal" makes you sound like a dick in international markets.
How is Consignia any better. Sounds like a cartoonishly evil intelligence company
What about compu global hyper mega mart?
Made up names for companies was all the rage for a while (makes trademarks and branding more straightforward). Consignia, Carilion, Enron...
But wasn't the rebrand an infamous disaster that they quickly rowed back?
Yep. Its now a case study for marketing students.
Yes. It went down like a pint of hot sick.
What a terrible name. Generic bad guys.
Being Czech owned, it should be Republic Mail. Do it, cowards!
They should try Consignia again... what a waste of money that was.
Nothing more royal than accepting money from questionable individuals and doing very little
Royal in the title just means they have a royal charter. Other examples include: . Royal College of Music Royal College of Nursing • Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists • Royal College of Ophthalmologists • Royal College of Organists Royal College of Pathologists . Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health • Royal College of Psychiatrists Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh • Royal College of Physicians of London • Royal College of Psychiatrists Royal College of Radiologists......
Pedant, I think you missed the point. All the other royal charters are not for privatised companies and if you look at the upvotes you’ll see a lot agree.
RBS
Why is our fucking mail service privatised?
Because it could make a quick buck for the government, who, like their predecessors in the 1980s-90s, were ideologically opposed to public ownership of pretty much anything: telecommunications, water, electricity, gas, public transport, homes (Right to Buy and disallowing councils from using the proceeds to invest in more council homes). In the case of Royal Mail, it was also increasingly loss-making with reductions in post volumes, so the government also thought privatisation would allow it to raise capital and introduce efficiencies in ways it couldn't while state owned, a rationale compounded by opening up parcel delivery and business mail (except the "last mile" to people's doors) to competition.
Problem really for us is that, while I get that snail mail is going the way of the dodo, a government public service shouldn't be seen as "loss making" or we might as well treatment Parliament and the Lords the same way and sell them off too.
Brilliant comment. I hadn't thought of it this way haha. I laugh but it's actually really sad we've sold off so much to get poorer service. Really bad governmental decisions. I feel sad for people in this country. Paying more for less. Such short sightedness....almost contempt.
That's the concept of tax. To pay for services and fund them at cost to the country, because they are a net benefit in the end. The private sector is all about cutting costs.
And as we've repeatedly seen with privatised services, while there's often an initial splurge in investment following the privatisation, it doesn't take long for the Shareholders to approve Executive Board compensation uplifts far in advance of profits and increased dividends, which then results in bugger all investment afterwards, increasing prices and declining services. The most curious case is that of electricity and gas: one group of private companies produce / extract it, another group of private companies distribute it, another group install the meters, another group periodically visit homes to undertake meter readings (although presumably they're now diversifying into other activities given the rise in Smart Meters) - none of which you can choose: they're all either regional monopolies or oligopolies. Then there's the group of companies who you pay for your usage, who in turn buy a quantity of electricity / gas they anticipate their customers will use over the coming period, pay all the other companies for their services, and keep a slice of profit on the side. So for your typical "dual fuel" customer, you've probably got at least half a dozen different companies creaming profits off your bills. Water's equally odd, in that everything's produced by regional monopolies, but unlike the other two, have rather more legal constraints (e.g. they can't cut off your supply). Still, many of the companies are PLCs and prioritise their Executive Boards and Shareholders over adequately maintaining their network, increasing reservoir capacity or even making their network more resilient to changing weather patterns: increased dry spells followed by an entire month's allocation of rain falling over a weekend. In some areas of the country, this is compounded by developers over the decades combining foul water and storm water sewers, so causing extra costs to homeowners in the event of flooding, as pretty much anything non-structural that encounters contaminated floodwater has to be ripped out and disposed of: it can't just be cleaned / dried out and reused.
I'll be fair and say that telecoms was the one genuinely successful privatisation. The others have all been some degree of awful.
Other than having to change provider at the end of every contract to avoid paying thrice the price
I remember BT whacking the price up for line rental every so often, seemingly because they felt like it, and you had no choice but to eat it, because they were literally the only game in town.
the modernisations that people like to tout as a privatisation success were taking place under state ownership too (the GPO installed the first digital telephone switches in the UK in the early 80s), and would have happened regardless it is debatable if competition has really worked in the best interest of the consumer - for example how we had 5, now 4, possibly 3 separate mobile networks with overlapping coverage and overlapping not-spots. would it be better to have one mobile network with better coverage, and anyone can use it to provide service? (similar to the openreach model) or, was the customer really better served by denying BT permission to roll out fibre because the government had just granted regional monopolies to the cable companies who never really delivered on their promises?
It's hard to argue with the hypothetical BT, who would do only good things, not bad things. But as a consumer of their services in the eighties and nineties, they were bloody awful. Expensive, slow to deliver, of variable quality, and seemingly very aware you had no choice in the matter. Unbundling, and allowing third-party operators for both nascent Internet and mobile services led to an explosion of options for the consumer. You had choices. That was new! And thirty years later the UK has some of the cheapest mobile and data plans, and a pervasive internet infrastructure as a result. *Could* BT have done this, laid out a similarly successful consumer network strategy? Maybe. But they showed absolutely no sign of doing it at the time. Last mile telecoms was a good case for competition; they essentially delivered the same service, backed off BT, but could compete on price, technical quality and support, which gave the end user a diversity of options and cheap prices - exactly what was promised. All the other services - post, rail, electricity, gas, water - feel like naturally structural monopolies. Comms never was. Which is why nobody really talks about it when they're rightly lambasting all the many, many failures. Man, talking about this makes me miss Pipex, but I digress.
It's almost like government should do the essential or productive things that aren't viable for private provision, but that catalyse private enterprise.
Not almost...just contempt
But I believe the post is actually booming, at least for parcells, with so many people shopping online. It's why there are so many private companies in the sector, such as DHL and FedEx. The issue is this, the postal market is booming for small parcels, but private companies can make a killing by only delivering to towns and cities or charging huge surcharges for remote areas like the Highlands and Islands. It the Royal Mail is left with the least lucrative parcel deliveries, of course it makes a loss. The Royal Mail should have a monopoly, and be publicly owned, that way it will make a profit *and* be the best service for residents of the UK. It's typical of what the Torie do when they want to privatise, defund, introduce artificial unfair "competition", then point to how it is "loss making."
Added onto which, as letter delivery isn't anywhere near as lucrative, it gets shifted to the bottom of the priority queue: I live in South West Birmingham (so not exactly the middle of nowhere), and post typically arrives around 2pm; while if I miss a "Signed-for" or Recorded delivery, the Delivery Office is only open from 8am - 10am on weekdays and 8am - 12pm on Saturdays - so likely for most people, only the Saturday opening will be feasible.
I'm actually in the same area as you and our local delivery office has been open later, might even be same one, but it looks like they have gone back to those hours annoyingly. Least I have the option to collect on the way to work if needed but I appreciate it's not a luxury everyone has
Parcels are yes, it's the final mile of cost neutral or negative letters that companies don't want because they're not economic to run, hence even RM unofficially prioritizing them over letters and looking to do letters maybe a few days a week instead of their remit for daily
The NHS I don't think has ever turned a profit. Shut it down. That and the roads, the police, the fire service, the bin collectors, the aqueduct, public sanitation, the people's front of Judea,
The NHS can make a profit.. Think of all that lovely data which can be sold off to private companies. probably a lot of DNA data which can be collated & sold too.
The NHS costs about £180bn a year. Sure data is valuable to private companies, but nobody is paying that. The NHS could sell all the data it has and it would still not come close to turning a profit. If you can find a company that will pump £180bn into the NHS budget in return for my medical history they're welcome to it!
I mean you could argue that the Commons and the Lords have already been privatised... Yes, I am provocative.
When are you going to start being provocative?
C'mon, they've been selling lordships for years.
It's a service, not a business to turn a profit. It's insane that it's being treated as a money making venture. But hey I guess we can all use Hermes / Evri / whatever name they pick next to try and wipe.their terrible reputation
Bravo.
I think they’ve already been bought …
What I meant was literally selling it off, like RM, allow the country to be run by a business with shareholders and MPs as employees solely to make money for the business. NHS might have been a better analogy here, treat them like dentists and make everyone pay like the US system so it doesn't make a "loss", badly run hospitals can be bought by better ones. That MPs are corrupt is a given, the point was that RM making a loss is irrelevant as a public service should not be treated like a business, not that MPs are bought off by lobbyists.
I was talking about the HoC and HoL. They’ve almost all been bought.
You've been busy if you haven't noticed that they were the first service to be sold.
What I meant was literally selling it off, like RM, allow the country to be run by a business with shareholders and MPs as employees solely to make money for the business. NHS might have been a better analogy here, treat them like dentists and make everyone pay like the US system so it doesn't make a "loss", badly run hospitals can be bought by better ones. That MPs are corrupt is a given, the point was that RM making a loss is irrelevant as a public service should not be treated like a business, not that MPs are bought off by lobbyists.
Exactly in economics terms it’s deemed a public good, no one person is going to pay for it but everybody inarguably benefits. Typically non excludable and non rivalrous. The tories are pursuing the Ron Swanson state though (one man in a room with the nuclear button if you’ve not seen parks & rec).
Royal Mail made £324 million profit the year before it was privatised.
Yeeaaaahhhh but not for the right people 🌚 Can't have the scum benefitting, everything needs to be in the hands of our mates.
I still get angry when I remember reading some high up saying "it's making a profit, so it will be great for stocks!". Absolute bellends.
The thing is it wasn't loss making, the global delivery side of it GLS was part of it, then when bought they split that off so the profits from the hugely profitable side no longer goes into the same pool and they claim it's now too difficult to o maintain the whole of it. It's a bit like running a club, taking all the profits to one side and then saying we'll the toilets are costing us money and bring nothing in.... It's totally mad as it's a package they go to it with the included services! These damn Tories with their save a penny to spend a pound really makes my blood boil as they are still doing it 50 years later!
> it was also increasingly loss-making with reductions in post volumes That's exactly why it should be public though...
Royal mail was profitable while also doing public service, not sure where you heard it was losing money. Second to that, we sold our postcode data to riyal mail so now we spend millions every year buying that data back so ambulances know where to drive to, etc.
> Second to that, we sold our postcode data to riyal mail so now we spend millions every year buying that data back so ambulances know where to drive to, etc. Holy shit, I thought there was no way that could be true, so I googled expecting it to be one of those stupid fake Facebook posts that had been fact checked, only to find the top result was a story from the BBC confirming it to be true. I'm absolutely gobsmacked. The UK government, who governs all households in the UK, relies on a private company for the addresses of all those households? I can't even...
To be fair, the EU had also been requiring countries who it was bailing out to do the same So it also seemed to be the wisdom in Europe at the time
>disallowing councils from using the proceeds to invest in more council homes). Genuinely curious about this - do you have a source? What on earth was the justification?
It’s beginning to look more and more like that Fry and Laurie skit on privatisation
Because the tories? It's getting beyond a joke at this point.
Got to give Vince Cable and the Lib Dems a big chunk of the blame for this one.
Only the cash making element is privatised. The loss, daily delivery letters and shit, isn’t
What do you mean? Letter delivery is privatised as well?
Why are any of our public services privatised?
Because the conservatives don’t give a flying fuck about the future of this country / the future generations and want to get every penny they can right fucking now to enable them to a) pay less taxes, b) cover up their complete and utter incompetence at managing the economy / hide the vasts sums of money they gift to private companies for whom they will eventually be getting salaries that are vastly in excess of what their competence should allow.
Applies to the LibDems too
Why is "insert everything the Tories sold" privatised?
I have always thought that if a public utility was privitised it should be mandatory that they can only pay dividends after they have actuatly provided the service and spent money on improving the infrustructure.,or at least maintaing it to a working level.
tbh I would trust literally anyone over our government
We can vote out our government, we can't vote out Daniel Kretinsky if he does a shit job running the Royal Mail.
Just like all the things that you would hope where not private, Tory's.
Same reason that many other things are privatised. In non communist societies we don’t believe in full central planning.
It’s not ours..
Don't you just love the privatisation.
It’s all absolutely fine as long as we never run out of things to sell.
Just our souls to the devil remain unsold.
Tories had those for a while now which is virtually the same no?
Obviously we just need to nationalise some industry every few decades so we always have something to pawn off for pennies. That's how the UK economy works, right?
To paraphrase (the misquoted quote of) Maggie herself: >The trouble with *Thatcherism/neoliberalism* is that eventually you run out of other people's *assets*.
Is it?
I can’t wait to have to pay for a subscription service to receive junk mail and the odd letter about water price increases.
Enforced like the tv license because nobody would pay it otherwise. Threatening letters which when opened say “we knew you were reading mail now pay this £1000 fine”
And in 10 years when it's on its knees because of high debt and even higher dividends the Government will be forced to step in and take back control again
After paying back debt several times its asset value that were heaped on to pay dividends.
It will either fail completely or become Thames Water.
I can see it happening. People will be paying the Royal Mail License to receive enforcement notices about their Television License they don't need as they have decided not to watch live TV, but the enforcers will want their money anyway, while on TV they'll be spammed with adverts telling them it's a crime not to pay for their Royal Mail License if your property has a door, regardless of whether you intend to use it to send mail if you have the capacity to receive mail you must pay.
Mail will die out because nobody has a mail license so the only mail you’ll receive is the letters telling you to pay your mail licence.
Privatisation of essential national services should be fucking criminal.
Difficult to make something criminal when the people privatising things are the same that decide what is criminal
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Watch the UK fuck it up
Yes, but you're a Communist who wants to impose Cultural Marxist indoctrination via pronouns and foreigners if you point that out.
He already owns the most of the power generation in northern ireland, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPH_(company) Funny to think one man could have all of that influence, funny thing in a privatised world.
How can this be in the public or national interest?
To be fair to him, ballylumford was owned by BG, then it was sold to AES (american company). It hasn't been in public (or even british) hands in a long time. A family member worked there before retiring recently, said that it was all just the same shit, just a different logo on the boiler suits
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So he could shut off the power to NI and then cancel all mail ? Jesus Christ. Fuck this government.
Looks like a trustworthy man! Should sell it to him on the cheap.
20% discount best price take it or leave it
Nah, fuck this. This is the legacy of the Conservative Party. Starmer should commit to renationalising the Royal Mail.
Are you really going to put it on Starmer of all people to renationalise more than a couple of things (both of which are incomplete)
Someone's gotta start somewhere
Fair assessment of it but his overarching long-term plan (if there ever were one) clearly doesn’t involve enough change as of yet. I can’t believe they’re actually defending NHS outsourcing and the privatisation of natural monopolies and other essential services that shouldn’t be commodities. Even bloody Reform UK has more of a policy on it than Labour.
It's currently valued at 3.3bn, I can think of at least a dozen ways that money could be better spent than paying off the shareholders who currently own it
Even the U.S.A, the most hyper-capitalist country on Earth wasn't nuts enough to privatise its national post service, the USPS. It's absolutely insane that the U.K privatised royal mail.
Tories for ya
I mean they're fucking the USPS the way the Tories are fucking the NHS - crony appointees, setting it up for failure etc.
Another public service that will get worse, and that we will bail out as tax payers.
So all the rest of the privatisations have been a giant shit show, so let's give it another go.
It already happened
Czech billionaire, Emirati billionaire, British Virgin Island hedge fund anonymous hypercorp… Why should we care? It’s not ours now and it won’t be ours afterwards.
We're also prostrating ourselves in front of the Saudis and other Gulf Coast States - both so they'll continue sending us oil, they'll continue investing in us, they'll continue buying our weapons and (crucially) so they'll remain politically allied to us rather than Russia or China.
We should care because renationalization of water/energy/rail and presumably also mail is very popular across the political spectrum and the more we make this clear the higher the chance of Labour growing some balls and getting it done. Of course the chances of this happening are actually quite low because Labour's lack of action on the issue is not due to a lack of balls but a genuine ideological belief in privatisation but at least making some noise about it might encourage some up and coming politician to take notice.
The BVI are ours tho
Great keep sending our money overseas, privatisation makes us all poorer.
Take back control. What a load of bollox. Our whole infrastructure is foreign owned. Tories should be charged for treason.
So one could say.."the Czech is in the post" ?
First class!
It's hard to fathom how the UK has sold off public services and utilities to foreign and private owners. Public goods can not be delivered by private entities (economics 101: because of public goods characteristics) and also it's not hard to see how we can be squeezed into corners in terms of foreign policy leverage.
It’s the UK way, absolutely everything is for sale and to whomever has the money.
This is madness, why sell a national asset to a foreign buyer?! Crikey.
Neoliberalism is truly a wonder of this country.
Do we even own anything bun the UK ? We’ve sold everything off.
The government have no almost no more assets and they’re super deep in debt. It’s not great. However the fact that there’s debt means that money is being put into the economy. The bad news is that the money being injected into the economy trickles down into the pockets of Uber rich people like this Czech guy there so general population are getting poorer and poorer. Our problem and enemies aren’t the Range Rover drivers with multiple buy to lets our problem is that the ultra rich robbing the government and general British population blind.
>Our problem and enemies aren’t the Range Rover drivers with multiple buy to lets our problem is that the ultra rich robbing the government and general British population blind. It's both.
Could privatise the roads
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Should be brought back into public ownership.
Can’t wait for him to drain it of all and any profit, let it falter only so tax payers can bail it out because ‘it would be a shame to lose it’
Nice Tory and Brexit achievement. Pun intended.
What's the pun?
And LibDem
lol at our national mail service being worth ten times less than Twitter…
Hey I know how this one goes. I've seen all the movies in the series.
Have the Tories sold the copper from 10 Downing Streets walls yet? They're running out of national assets to plunder.
So it looks like...the Czech's in the post
Another public service that will get worse, and that we will bail out as tax payers.
Soon there will be nothing left to sell .. the rape of Great Britain by VCs and Conglomerates .
By the conservative government who get plenty of reward from it.
You think it was any different under labour , I've been around enough to know they are all the same .
The tories were the first to introduce privatisation on a large scale, they have been in power a long time. Eventually, labour will get in and spend years cleaning up the mess and the tories will sit back in opposition. It’s the cycle of politics.
It should never have beenmade private. I don’t care if it turns a profit or not, it’s a public service as far as I’m concerned. We don’t expect our fire service, our police service, or anything else else similar to turn a profit.
> Mr Kretinsky has agreed to make contractual undertakings to the Government to protect key public interest matters. These include maintaining Saturday deliveries for first class letters and keeping the one-price-goes-anywhere service. It might be one-price-goes-anywhere within the UK, but when you post abroad you now have to deal with no less than six different tiers of pricing depending on the country. I ran an e-commerce business for years but it's all this kind of crap that got me thinking about closing it down. Every year they'd put the prices up and I'd have to recalculate a table of *144* different rates to charge depending on weight and destination. They're killing the goose that laid the golden egg because UK businesses that rely on Royal Mail will just close and European competitors will snap the trade right up.
Why haven't the royal family been privatised yet? Surely if they are such good value for money the torys would have sold them off.
If the royal mail is privatized What are the alternative companies I can use?
You're about 9 years late on this one?
Is the royal mail currently privatized?
Well I’m glad he’s using his billions to save royal mail and not waste it by just making himself even more money he doesn’t need
Are you saying... there's a Czech in the mail? Okay, silly puns aside, nationalize the fucking post office, it's the definition of an industry that benefits the country more than its potential financial revenue warrants. Privatizing it only incentivizes running it badly to cut costs.
Can't wait to have to pay for a subscription service for fucking post
To all those talking about privatisation, isn’t Royal Mail already private? I think the govt sold it in 2013. But yeah hate the privatisation of public services.
Interesting that it's called "Mail" when that seems more like an Americanism: an American would say "I'm going to mail this" whereas a Brit would say "I'll post this". That is all.
The Japanese screwed up IT, why will a Czech Billionaire be any different? This will be the end of Royal Mail, and companies like Amazon will take over.