As a journalist, I like to have a bit of serious news, so I expose myself to an hour’s BBC news a day. If I wasn’t working with a logistics consultancy, I wouldn’t know that Royal Mail is being sold to a Czech billionaire. The BBC is instead focused on brown people on rubber boats and the one-sided war in Palestine.
Royal Mail is being sold
Royal Mail is set to be sold for £3.5 billion to a Czech billionaire called Daniel Křetínský.
A quick scan of Google News shows me some non-newspaper coverage – the Mail, S*n and Torygraph have passing mention but not the sort of titanic dust up that one of the UK’s oldest institutions being sold abroad should cause.
International Distribution Services (IDS) is the holding company of two major divisions, Royal Mail and General Logistics Services (GLS). You may well be aware that Royal Mail was hit by strikes last year, many of which I proudly supported as a trade unionist.
The company is about to publish its financial data on Thursday, and honestly, it won’t look good. The odds are that Royal Mail, the universal service obligation postal operator in the UK, will make a slight profit, but IDS itself will benefit from the non-unionised workforce of GLS, which will make the figures reasonable.
Billionaires Don’t Like Unions
In a recent statement, CWU General Secretary Dave Ward said, “This political debate is going to be really, really interesting to see it unfold. There’s a lot to talk about here with the politicians, with Vesa, and with the company and we’re going to be right at the centre of that.”
Czech billionaire Daniel Křetínský is behind Vesa, which is already the biggest shareholder of the postal operator. Few billionaires like unions and there’s no reason to believe this guy is any different. He’s already seen just what a well organised workforce can do to the company, with the strikes last year causing it to make huge losses. I can only imagine he will want to clean house and weaken the unions.
Where’s the BBC?
If, like me, the only source of your mainstream news comes from the BBC, you’d not have a clue about the bargaining that has been going on. The BBC instead tells us to worry about people shitting their pants in Brixham and gives almost hourly reports of rubber boats in the Channel.
Right now, with one of our oldest institutions being sold out of the country, there should be some serious media coverage going on. Why? I can only think this is because the Tory run board of the BBC has decided this is a non-issue that could damage the government. Consequently, there has been little, if any, public debate on the matter.
Quite apart from the boats being a perennial distraction from the terrible way this country is being run, there is a conspiracy of silence going on over a number of issues, and that the BBC is now ignoring the Royal Mail is pretty much solid proof.
I’m embarrassed to say that many BBC journalists are in my union. Perhaps they will wake up and cover the Royal Mail, as they too might be privatised and sold off to a union-hating billionaire one day themselves. There isn’t much else to sell off from the government, and I’d not put it past any party to do that.
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