Twitter’s soon to be conversion to full public share ownership reminds us why we must convert Royal Mail to full Public share ownership too. Twitter’s ability to upstage it like this ought to be a wake-up call. The Royal Mail’s Govt ownership now looks like a historical aberration, an archaic, almost quaint relic of a long-forgotten pre-digital world. Once, the challenge was to transport hand-written letters using horses from London to Birmingham; today, it is to attract business from the likes of speed of light digital online stores. But the real reason the monarch and subsequently politicians wanted to own a monopolistic postal service had little to do with notions of public service: they wanted control over their subjects. When King James moved to London in 1603, the postal service he established between the city and Edinburgh was deliberately designed to retain power over the Scottish Privy Council. In future decades and centuries, the government’s monopoly over the postal service was always fiercely protected, and eventually, in most cases, extended to telephony. Controlling people’s communications – or at least, preventing entrepreneurs from setting up their own rival, and potentially subversive postal networks – was a key strategy pursued by politicians and governments of all stripes But the world has thankfully moved on. The free trade advances since in the 1980s finally smashed the monopolies in telecoms, giving rise to a very early, tiny British cell phone provider (eventually called Vodaphone) and led to an ever expanding field of fixed and cellular phone networks - even though the more ancient postal ones had to wait a while longer. Technology heralded the arrival of early internet bulletin board systems, then mobile phones and then, of course, the world wide web overlaid upon the ever expanding internet, which went mainstream circa 1995 and pulverised letter-writing. Suddenly, everybody could communicate all the time using a multiplicity of competing networks, devices and systems. It is hard to to remember what things used to be like: we now know what real freedom feels like, and nobody is going back to the staid, controlled, slow, top-down ways of the past. In that context, it makes obvious sense to remove postal and telephone services from the hands of government to the public and remove monopolies (though, of course, the Royal Mail’s reform doesn’t go that far yet, with all its old universal service obligations remaining for the moment). Another good reason why governments around the world are no longer running expensive postal services is that they realise that they no longer need actually to own the communications infrastructure to monitor what is going on, for good or for ill. They can ensure national security – or spy on their citizens – by making use of spooks’ cheaper eavesdropping techniques! In the age of Twitter, Skype and Web shopping, it makes no sense to keep the Royal Mail in govt ownership and not public. The company needs the flexibility to adapt. It needs to be able to raise the capital it needs to fight back against its (at the moment superior) parcel-post competitors in the UK, grow its international businesses and to make a profit on the letters that it is forced to deliver via TNT at cost. The Govt has made a mistake here: it should have unleashed a marketing campaign aimed at investors, like the successful BT shares and the British Gas “Tell Sid” commercials of the 1980s. But this is 2013, so perhaps ministers will take to social networks, and start to Tweet Sid? https://royalmailshares.service.gov.uk/publichomepage.aspx telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/investing/10303887/Royal-Mail-how-when-why-and-why-not-to-invest.html
Posted on: Sun, 15 Sep 2013 19:59:57 +0000
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