The government has thrown its weight behind the Hooper Report and decided to sell 30% of its stake in Royal Mail. Mandelson (him again!) has swung them behind the privatising ideologues.

Apart from anything else, the policy is staggeringly irrelevant to the real and urgent problems facing Britain. It is as if New Labour, forced to put its neo-Thatcherite policies on hold by the economic crisis, have taken the opportunity to prove to big business that they are as soft a touch as ever in doing their bidding. Ironically the announcement came on the same day as Ofgem announced an enquiry into the way the privatised power companies carved up the energy market and how they screw the consumers.

The background to all this is that Royal Mail has been making shed loads of profit for us as a publicly owned company for years. The trouble was that the Treasury has been using the Post office as a milch cow all that time, siphoning off all the money. Then the government complains that the firm hasn’t invested. No wonder!

Mandelson’s answer is to bring in the private sector. As the big six energy companies have forcibly reminded us, these characters are only in it for what they can loot. They won’t put in. They’ll just take out. TNT made a packet providing the scab lorries used to break the Fleet Street printers strike in 1986-87. Last year they made a total hash by losing discs with details of 25 million child benefit claimants they were paid to deliver. Now they’ve been rewarded by being promised a slice of the Royal Mail. No silly nonsense about competitive tendering. TNT are already set up as by Mandelson as the preferred bidder.

Quite naturally the main trade union representing the workers, the CWU, is relieved that the government has declared the pension fund safe. But it’s a liberty that New Labour have only guaranteed pension rights – with a possible £8bn deficit looming – in order to fatten up Royal Mail for privatisation. It would never do for the private sector to have to shoulder any of the losses, would it?

The government’s handling of the Royal Mail has been a disaster. It is true that it has begun to make a loss and that investment has fallen behind. But the Post Office is bleeding to death from a thousand cuts and long years of government neglect. Thousands of sub-Post Offices have been closed, despite 4 million people signing a petition against closure. This has torn the heart out of many local communities. It is shredding a web of local offices which would have put the Post Office in an excellent position to barge the failed commercial banks out of the way with and replace them with a people’s bank using branch offices. After all, there are still more POs than branches of all the commercial banks in Britain.

The government’s plan is daft. But they are in a weak position, and they know it. As soon as the announcement was made, Jim McGovern resigned in disgust as PPS. Over a hundred Labour MPs are said to be against the plan. Will they show the gumption to oppose Brown and Mandelson? Labour did, after all, pledge to the electorate that Royal Mail would remain in public hands in the 2005 election. Public ownership was also a commitment in the ‘Warwick II’ negotiations with the trade unions over the summer.

The Communication Workers’ Union has yet to declare its hand. Postal workers must be worried sick. Privatisation always means worse pay and conditions for the work force as well as a deteriorating service for the public. How else can the privateers make money?

Well, they’re not making money at our expense! Royal Mail has functioned as a public service for 350 years. The entire working class has a stake in it. Let’s unite to throw out the plan and keep the service public.