Opposing ‘St Vince’s’ privatisation of the Post Office is the first test for our new leader

By Darrell Goodliffe

When is a privatisation not a privatisation? Well, according to the increasingly self-deluded Liberal Democrats it’s when 90% of shares are sold to private interests and a pathetic 10% offered to the employees. You really couldn’t make it up could you? ‘Comrade Cable’ obviously needs a basic maths lesson; 10% is a controlling stake of absolutely nothing; words like ‘tokenism’ and ‘gesture politics’ come to mind.

In actual fact, it’s a lever to be used against the Communications Workers Union when, invariably and rightly, they oppose the proposals. ‘Look at these ungrateful workers’ the government will say ‘we give them shares and they go on strike’. Billy Hayes is right, the offer is insulting and it’s a further insult to people’s intelligence to compare it to the likes of John Lewis which is actually a genuine mutual. Laughably, Cable proclaimed the Post Office network was ‘not for sale’- he also promised ‘no new mass closures’ with all the sincerity of a man who knows that he will be in no position to make good on such a promise.

The battle over the future of the Post Office is important. Why? It is the first chance for a Labour Party under new leadership to lead a popular rebellion against this government’s ideologically-driven slash-and-burn agenda. And it could be a battle that the ConDems lose. This government’s great strategic mistake is turning out to be their war on the middle-classes; where Thatcher mastered the art of dividing to rule this government is a failure and, as time runs its course, they will get their wish in creating a new kind of pluralism. However, this pluralism will not be one they desire; it will be the seething resentment that resonates as much in the swelling inner-city ghettos as it does in the fearful leafy-suburbs’ and the united action of all who are seeing their living standards slashed.

This is another point about the Post Office issue; it’s as likely to offend the rural service user as it does the disgruntled worker provider. Managed properly this is a battle the CWU could easily win. If, as it should, it puts forward an alternative based around the transformation of Royal Mail into a company run entirely as a co-op or a mutual and includes its transformation into some kind of peoples bank it could potentially rally support from service users very quickly. It would also transform a defensive struggle – one that could easily be portrayed as reactionary – into an offensive one that maintains public ownership but also makes much needed changes, and crucially brings in a flood of much needed capital.

However, the $ 64,000 question for the new leader is will they support this? Let’s be frank, our attempts to privatise the Post Office were wrong. They were emblematic of the serious problem that plagued our thinking – that the market was the new answer to everything. If the market was the answer then given its spectacular implosion over the last few years then one wonders seriously what the question was in the first place. ‘New Labour’ was market fundamentalism and it’s a tired, busted flush that the electorate has overwhelmingly rejected.

If our new leader can’t support the CWU, if it can’t show on an issue like this that we are on the side of the dispossessed (and I include David Miliband’s infamous C1 and C2’s in the ranks of those dispossessed) then forget the polls because Labour has a more serious problem. No amount of senseless ‘untiy parades’ will return Labour to Number 10 if it is not the right kind of unity. The electorate may not like a disunited party but they like hollowed out and intellectually tired ones even less. If the leadership doesn’t take a stand on this issue it will send a clear signal that the atrophy that lost Labour the last election remains in place, and that no lessons have been learnt…