Royal Mail is a critical national asset. Selling to a Czech billionaire would be extraordinary
Britain is already suffering for its naive ‘help yourself’ approach to foreign takeovers
Not allowing foreigners to invest in the country is a strange attitude for a place that’s been running a trade deficit for decades.
But then there are those more nationalistic than is possibly sensible, eh?
Are they going to take all the posties to Prague? Whatever replaces them might be better 🙂
A critical national asset? Surely it is more of an asset that everyone criticises. Most of the physical stuff that arrives chez moi these days goes straight into the bin. Even my correspondence with the taxman is digital
I don’t suppose there are any Czech billionaires interested in the NHS or the BBC?
Must admit I usually get my bills by post here in Oz. But of course I’m stubborn, and feel that the way it was done three quarters of a century ago is still the way to do it.
Yes but Royal Mail is, well I can’t decide whether to say shit, shite or crap*. Who’d want it? Sell it, greater fool theory applies.
*And no, the Conquest limerick doesn’t help.
Why is it “critical”. Other than birthday cards, letter post is about dead. I still get the odd thing that’s useful and not digital, but there isn’t much left. Outside of that, parcels are pretty much an open market. I send things with a pickup point to drop off point and it’s cheap and reliable. Royal Mail disappears from the latter? Who cares? There’s another half dozen companies doing it.
I prefer my communications in duplicate e.g. one email, one by post. That way I have a chance of getting one in time.
Well letting foreigners have Thames Water has proved so very successful, hasn’t it? Thats probably going to cost us all a fortune if it ends up being nationalised and subsidised by the taxpayer. Does that get put into your economic model of how beneficial foreign ownership is?
A UK based owner might have some basic care of something that is a staple of national life. Bill Smith, billionaire owner of The Post Office who lives in the Uk won’t want to be turned into a social pariah by crashing the whole thing into the ground, even if he does do very well out of it. Mr Kretinsky on the other won’t care a jot what happens here if he can make a few euros more.
And anyway, buying an existing UK business is not an ‘investment’ in the UK, any more than me buying shares in Google is an ‘investment’ in the USA. If Mr Kretinsky wants to invest in the UK, start a business here, create something from scratch, rather than just buying into an oligopoly and milking it to death (which is what he’ll do, like every other foreign owner of UK businesses does).
Look at Boots, decent UK business turned to shit by foreign owners draining it of cash. Have you been in a Boots recently? Shabby shitholes with hardly any stock. Thats what foreign ownership does, bleeds a business to death, because why the f*ck should they care about anything else than their bottom line?
I like stuff owned by foreigners.
EasyJet
Grand Central trains
Wikipedia
It’s the stuff owned by Brits that suck, the NHS, especially the fake charity NHSforest, libraries, HS2, the universities.
Thats what foreign ownership does, bleeds a business to death, because why the f*ck should they care about anything else than their bottom line?
That is true Jim. But bear in mind that that is what British businesses also do abroad.
It is endemic, UK us not the only victim.
The chief problem in modern business is that corporations have been taken over by a double headed monster : HR and Accounts.
As a result companies no longer engage in longer term investment eg training except for that required by HR. Companies become obsessed with the bottom line and not what the next 5, 10 even 20 years will bring. That is why no one will build nukes anymore, because they have a 20year RoI but then make oodles of cash, unless some idiot politician closes them all down.