Tom Austin wrote:The UK postal service is known to be "fiercely competitive", but this 'fact' is little more than a slogan. The semblance of competitiveness has been long-engineered within Royal Mail. I suspect that the RM management bonus structure takes account of this.
Much that has already been privatised is now being run at a profit for the benefit of other State owned enterprises, just not British enterprises.
You are simply wrong about this. Competition in the postal market is very real, and has done serious damage to Royal Mail's position. The profitable work is being skimmed off by rival firms, whilst a Royal Mail is left with the job of handling what remains. What's more, the rival firms, having run the mail they collect through their own machines, then dump it on Royal Mail to deliver, having taken a big chunk of the profits for each item. The hard (unprofitable) work of walking to every door in the country is left to the postmen of Royal Mail. And of course, these profits that are skimmed off are the very same profits that Royal Mail would be using to subsidise loss making operations like delivering to the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, in order to support the Universal Service that they are (legally) obliged to provide. Royal Mail as we knew it was effectively killed off when the market was opened up. Privatisation is simply the logical final step in the process Labour started in the late 1990's and early 2000's.