SWWood wrote: "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.
You fail to mention the other biggest problem for Royal mail - email.
You cannot benefit long term through protectionism, it can only be damaging.
We had many industries that should have been allowed to modernise and adapt in the 50's, 60's and 70's prevented from doing so through the state ownership model trying to protect jobs and suffering from backward looking trade unions.
If they had been left to compete as private companies, to modernise and do so without the malign influence of trade unions we might now still have many 'old' industries that have since been lost to the UK. Some of those companies would have been lost, yes - that is a part of a healthy competitive market, but others would have thrived.
Back to Royal Mail, it has not been run well enough and cannot be while it is in state ownership.