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EU has stamped on world's best postal service
How is a profit-making, well-liked and fair-priced business enterprise destroyed?
Well, it is simple – you bankrupt it. And how do you do that? Well, it is easy – just hand over control to unelected foreign bureaucrats and allow foreign companies to seize the profitable areas of business, forcing the remainder into debt.
And that is precisely what has happened to the Royal Mail and its network of post offices during the past 11 years.
Until the late 1990s, Royal Mail had a monopoly of British postal services and was therefore able to provide delivery and collection services regardless of where one lived in Britain – even in small villages a post office could be found. The whole thing worked beautifully – the profitable urban and city services offset the less-profitable rural operations. It was the best and the most reliable postal service in the world.
But the European Union, into whose clutches we are being thrust, is obsessed with imposing competition, whether or not an enterprise such as the Royal Mail is good and works well.
In 1997 the EU issued Directive 97/67/EC, Privatisation of Postal Services, introducing an EU-wide postal service. That was completely at odds with the unique British system and meant the Royal Mail had to go. The break-up was achieved by gradually and secretly dismantling what was an integral part of British life.
EU Directive 97/67/EC opened wide the door for public-sector firms, mainly the Dutch TNT and German Deutsche Post DHL, to cherry-pick the profitable areas, leaving the less profitable to the Royal Mail. More damage came with a further EU Directive, 2002/39/EC, calling for “further market opening” – more business to private firms.
In less than 10 years, the Royal Mail and its post office network was fractured and losing money.
The EU has set 2009 as the year “for the full accomplishment of the internal market for postal services” (art.14, EU Directive 2002/39/EC).
That is how the EU and British politicians destroyed the Royal Mail.
Labour, Tories, Lib Dems and the SNP are all committed to rule from Brussels and deny voters their democratic right to decide their own form of government.
MARGARET NEEDHAM
Edrom
Duns
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Thursday 24 May 2012
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