I am a child of the 1970s and 80s so privatisation holds no fears for me. British Telecom, British Airways, even the railways, were all improved and transformed by the end of state ownership and there's every chance of the same happening to Royal Mail now the Government has sold it final stake in the business. Margaret Thatcher once said she would never privatise the Queen's head, but now, finally, thankfully, her political descendants have gone and done it anyway.
The immediate financial benefits of the deal are obvious (all of the £591m raised by the sale will go straight to paying down the national debt), but there will be longer term benefits too for staff, taxpayers and other businesses. The other day, I was talking to a man who runs a small firm from East Lothian delivering packages around the UK and he was telling me things were going extremely well for him because of the increase in internet deliveries. In the years to come, I expect other similar businesses will spring up once people realise the old mail monopolies have gone.
There are other good reasons to welcome the privatisation of Royal Maul and the first and most important of them is that the service is likely to improve, just as it has with other services that were once in public hands. I travel on trains a lot and, although privatising a natural monopoly like the rail network is tricky and needs a good tendering process to ensure competition, the service is much better than it was before privatisation. Talk to anyone in their 60s or 70s and they'll tell you what the trains were like 40 years ago and how reviled the service was. Admittedly, there have been problems with franchising, but passenger numbers are up since privatisation, new trains have been introduced and on the whole the network works well.
The good news with the latest privatisation is that the Royal Mail is a much better fit than the railways because there is no natural monopoly in delivering mail, only the monopoly that has been imposed by decades of custom and practice. Some of the problems with privatisation in, say, the energy business have been down to getting the regulatory framework right (and even after all this time, it still isn't), but there will be no such problems with the mail. In theory, anyone will be able to set up a delivery company, charge a price they think will attract customers and crack on.
The benefit of that process will be felt by the customers who can shop around, but there will be benefits for Royal Mail staff too. The stake that the Government sold off this week represents 13 per cent of the business, but a one per cent stake was also awarded to Royal Mail workers, meaning staff now own a total of 12 per cent of the business. Many of them will never have owned shares before; many of them will be able to sell them in a few years for a bit of a profit; it is a new chapter in the Thatcher ideal of opening up share ownership to a new generation.
Has the privatisation of Royal Mail been handled perfectly? No – the stock that was sold off in 2013 was priced way too low by the then Business Secretary Vince Cable and his advisors, but even such ministerial incompetence is another argument for privatisation. Businesses tend to wither and wilt in the hands of government and thrive in the hands of private individuals and my instinct is that we should keep politicians as far away as possible from entrepreneurship – an instinct only deepened by the flailing chaos of Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell.
I realise there is probably a lot riding on the success or failure of the Royal Mail deal now that Corbyn has put nationalisation back on the agenda, but the prospects are good. Indeed, the success of the privatisation might embolden the UK Government to take on even bigger and more exciting challenges. The BBC for instance – can it really stay in public ownership in the age of internet television? Or the National Health Service – wouldn't some privatisation help to raise money for the service without increasing public spending? We may be some way off such ideas yet, but the privatisation of Royal Mail may have moved them a little bit closer.
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