Royal Mail sell-off in the post as £3bn deal mooted for Urenco

[muriel_volestrangler]

Trade unions have vowed to combat the looming privatisation of Royal Mail as the government kickstarted a series of multibillion-pound sell-offs by announcing plans to sell the state's £3bn stake in the uranium enrichment company Urenco.
...
Ministers believe several assets are ripe for sale now stock markets have returned to their pre-crash peaks, and investors are ready to make long-term commitments after two years of turmoil in the eurozone. The Royal Mail is the most contentious candidate for a sell-off or flotation, with a stock market offering the most likely option in the autumn, a move that would value the business at up to £3bn. The Student Loans Company is also going under the hammer, with a deal expected by next April. The government is also working on a sell-off of blood plasma supplier Plasma Resources UK, which could be worth up to £200m.

The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) launched the first of the wave of privatisations on Monday by announcing plans to dispose of "some or all" of its 33% stake in Urenco, the world's second-largest provider of nuclear fuel.

Urenco, based in Capenhurst, near Chester, and with three other plants in Germany, the Netherlands and the US, claims to provide 31% of the world's enriched uranium for nuclear power. The company is estimated to be worth €10bn (£8.6bn).

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2013/apr/22/uk-sepll-urenco-stake

So, privatise the Royal Mail (if we can privatise that, can we privatise the royals too?), the loans company - so that the provision of university education now becomes a for-profit activity (I presume this privatised firm will still have HMRC doing the debt collection for it), and the blood plasma supplier (this is not sourced from UK donations, since they still can't screen for vCJD, but it's still an essential part of the NHS)? Thatcher may be dead, but her unquiet spirit roams the corridors of Westminster and Whitehall ...

[LeftishBrit]

1. The postal service is one of the few things in the UK that still usually works...

expect an end to that, if the privatization goes ahead. The idea that privatization of public services makes them more efficient is an exploded myth, at least if 'efficient' is used in its popular sense of 'works smoothly', rather than in its political/business sense of 'employing as few staff as possible'.

[non sociopath skin]

2. I never hear the Tories talking about improvements via privatisation these days.

They seem comfortable about their supporters making money out of former state assets as an end in itself.

The Skin