Monday, December 27, 2010

Telling Cameron No - to Postal Service Privatisation

The CWU are organising a rally and demo in Witney, Oxfordshire on January 9th.  Witney is the Constituency seat of Mr Cameron!

I would suspect that the privatisation of Posties is a live political issue in such a predominantly rural and agricultural area.  I'm pretty sure the Post Office does not make any money here from running an universal service.

Interesting to see how they get on.

See source of Cameron's picture and a previous reference to Whitney here.

5 comments:

Paul Cooney said...

I know you won't be surprised by my question but how do you balance your support for the Labour Party while criticising the ConDems for following Labour policy like privatising the post office and the NHS?

John Gray said...

Hi Paul
Actually I am surprised at this question - especially now we have witnessed the reality of the ideological attacks by the Condems. I didn’t think that people even thought of arguing that hoary old chestnut anymore?

Within the Party I opposed the partial privatisation of the Post office and was pleased that a Labour government changed its mind - due in part to internal pressure and trade union lobbying. The best hope of a public post office was with the re-election of a Labour government. Alas, this didn’t happen.

As for “privatising the NHS” – come off it Paul – you should know better. The Coalition is going to try and smash the NHS to bits and pieces – if they get away with it you will not have a free and publically accountable (flawed as it was)NHS. As well as ordinary workers being utterly stuffed.

Finally it is a free country and everyone has the right to work against Labour and not vote for them but they must realise that there is a consequence – there is no alternative to Labour (warts and all) except the Tories.

It's a shame we have to relearn this lesson every time

Paul Cooney said...

I do hope that your own local Labour Party deserves your vocal support better than mine. Cllr Mehboob Khan, Labour leader of Kirklees Council, voted with the other members of the Kirklees PCT this month to hand over 1300 NHS Community workers to a private social enterprise. The Huddersfield Labour MP, Barry Sheerman, said he didn't care who provided NHS services as long as they were of good quality. Examples such as these maybe the warts and all you refer to, but saying there is no alternative means that you put up with such examples. I could understand such support you valiantly supply if the internal democratic machinery was restored and allowed ordinary members a real influence in policy direction, but there is no sign of that yet. Keep fighting and I sincerely hope you succeed in making the LP viable again.

John Gray said...

Hi Paul
With respect I think you are missing the point. Whether or not what you have quoted is fair comment or not (and I simply don’t know) you cannot in my view expect to win every fight and battle and rip your card up over every decision you disagree with.

This is the same for the Party and for trade unions. As a UNISON member I have fought bitterly against things that I thought were fundamentally wrong - yet when the union has decided (branch, region or national level) I would still support the union position no matter what while still trying internally to argue for change.

I think that we can change the Party toward a more “left” position and still win elections. However, we have got to face the facts that “left” in the Labour Party have been to-date pretty hopeless and ineffectual (with honourable exceptions – such as yourself) – apart from the professional splitters and wreckers it is dominated by disorganised, personality driven, obsessive, sectarian, boorish, divisive, finger pointing, paranoids...and those are some of the more positive things...(joke)

Anonymous said...

Dear Paul,

The NHS is the public service that makes the most use of private sector contractors face to face with the public. That began on day one, when it took over that record from the Post Office.