Summary
The UK government has approved Czech billionaire Daniel Křetínský’s £3.6bn takeover of International Distribution Services (IDS), Royal Mail’s parent company, after a national security review.
It marks the first foreign ownership in Royal Mail’s 508-year history. The government retains a “golden share” to protect the postal service’s obligations, branding, and UK-based operations.
The deal includes commitments to maintain the universal service, worker protections, and delivery performance.
While seen as a pivotal moment for Royal Mail’s future, scrutiny persists over Křetínský’s ties to Russian energy and controversial business dealings.
Yeah shit is gonna get sold and everything will go to shit over here. This is Labour though, the liberal party, doing this over in England. Just goes to show you what neoliberalism, regardless of particular party, will eventually do. Privatize privatize privatize.
The Royal Mail was privatized already in 2013 by a Tory government, this is just a sale between two private entities.
Unfortunately, modern Labour are centrist, much like the US Democrats, so we see rather a lot of surprisingly right-leaning decisions from what ought to be a left-leaning party. “Liberal” isn’t a completely accurate term for them these days.
We also have a third party called “Liberal Democrats” who were positioned in that centrist position until Labour moved right and stole it from them. Now they still try to sit between, pleasing hardly anyone.
When there was a left-leaning leader running the Labour party a few years ago, much panic ensued among the rich and powerful, and dirty tricks and smear campaigns were undertaken to get him as far out of the way as possible.
It probably didn’t help that he didn’t particularly want to be PM, but he was the only man who would do it.
Edit: Reworded for accuracy.
Not centrist: conservative. Liberals only invented that label so they could call themselves something other than conservative.
Thanks for the extra information for those less informed about polítics there. It really is eye opening how few people understand the positions of Labour and US Democrats on the political spectrum. Right of center and moving further right is spot on.