Royal Mail is privatised, due to EU regulation

The UK Government will be helpless to prevent huge job losses and a looming pensions disaster when the Royal Mail is privatised, due to EU regulation
 
Paul Nuttall MEP, UKIP Deputy Leader points out that Westminster will be hamstrung by the same EU regulations that forced it into privatisation.
“It was of course three successive EU Postal Services Directives that created this mess, and under the same law the Government will be banned from giving the Royal Mail any state aid if it catastrophically fails.
 
“The Postal Services Directive made it clear that the market for mail delivery had to be opened up to competition. As a result, the more profitable services such as business mail were forced to compete with cheaper foreign competitors while Royal Mail was lumbered with the costly hand-delivery and sorting processes. On top of that, as life has moved progressively online we are sending fewer and fewer letters. The Royal Mail was doomed.
 
“Now the final nail is in the coffin and the Royal Mail will become fully privatised, it’s going to really struggle to compete in the market place. In order to survive there will have to be closures. There will have to be job losses. These employees’ shares that are being championed by the Prime Minister will be completely and utterly worthless. But under EU state aid rules the UK Government will be strictly forbidden from helping the Royal Mail with taxpayers’ money.  It will also be forbidden to help plug the £9 billion pension pot deficit.
 
“We will be left with a completely destroyed Royal Mail, once a proud British institution that did so much more than just deliver letters. We can thank the EU for that, and we can also thank the EU when Westminster finally wakes up and realises there’s a disaster in the post.”

---

Notes:
• The directives forced Royal Mail to take the burden of the universal obligation to deliver all personal mail, while being forced open up to competition in the business mail section of the service to foreign competitors.

• Business mail is the profitable side of the service which helps to pay for the less profitable personal mail. However the EU has allowed companies to compete with Royal Mail for business mail, thus reducing the vital income that they needed to survive. This has of course made the service much poorer. Many of the foreign companies which now compete with Royal Mail, such as DHL, are foreign state subsidised.

• It was EU state-aid laws which resulted in the closing of thousands of Post Offices several years ago. These EU rules are intended to stop the government intervening to "distort" the EU Common Market by favouring one company over the other - but in practise what happened was that the Government was banned, by the EU Commission, to give the Post Office network the subsidies it needed to keep every branch open - which led to large-scale closures up and down the country.

• Labour MEP, Brian Simpson, championed the legislation and helped to force it through the EU parliament! Yet the Labour party now pretend it's a bad thing to privatise the mail

• There were several votes in the EU "parliament" on this privatisation of the mail service and at every stage it was only UKIP that voted against. Labour, Lib Dems and the Tories all voted in favour of these EU laws.