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Conservatives Back On Track?

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Gromit | 06:27 Mon 07th Oct 2013 | News
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Today:
// Last minute dash for Royal Mail shares as City speculators set to make £millions
A late rush to buy shares in the Royal Mail was under way on Sunday night, with investors predicted to enjoy an instant profit of up to 40 per cent. //

Last week:
No benefits for anyone under 25
Pick up litter for ypur Dole
Bedroom Tax is here to stay.

Anymore proof needed the Conservatives have got into their stride and are finally running the Government like they always do?
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Gromit......" Speculators" can be of ANY political persuasion.

For me, the Conservatives should ditch ( not sure how ) the Lib Dems and move further to the right.
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Sqad,

I know that. Benefit claimants can be also.

I was more thinking about taking from the poor to give to the rich.
You best gather votes on the middle ground. There's not enough on the far right, or left, so politicians need to compromise.
Gomit
I was more thinking about taking from the poor to give to the rich.

No....really?
Question Author
//...the Conservatives should... move further to the right. //

I would very much be in favour of them doing that.
Gromit, you know very well that speculators can drive the price one way or another. We will only know the true worth after a few months when the speculating has died down.

Speculating has no bearing on the real value of a company.

Do you have a pension? if so I bet you will own some shares shortly; except I suspect you probably have a gold plated pension (s*d the poor eh?)
I must say I was somewhat irked, to say the least, back in maggie's days.
At every sell-off we had to witness hooray-henrys (share underwriters?) celebrating. Actually opening bottles of champagne,on the floor of the exchange, as the price of sell-offs rocketed.
Well yes you might say, they took a risk which paid off, deserved every penny.
However, the first sell-off that went tits-up, the price of the shares fell (blue arrow?) the same people went to the government and demanded their money back. And got it.
Heads they win, tails we lose.
The privatisation of our Royal Mail will all end in tears.

I predict that within 10 years, most of the shares will be owned by foreigners, we will no longer have a daily post through our letter boxes, and the present arrangement of the same price for a letter, no matter where it is going to in Britain will be a distant memory. The cost of posting a simple letter or package will have rocketed, even more than it has recently.

The new company will also require lashings of subsidy, in the same manner as the railways, in order to maintain a service. Thus the subsidies will come in the front door from the tax payer and go straight out the back door into the shareholders pockets, again, just like the railways.

Even Thatcher didn't try to sell off the post, even though her government had sold off everything else that wasn't nailed down.

The money raised by the sale will be used to provide a huge tax relief for wealthy people.

The Tories are on track all right, stealing from its own citizens, just like it always has done. Its the 1980's all over again.
these two dont add up together:

The new company will also require lashings of subsidy, in the same manner as the railways, in order to maintain a service. Thus the subsidies will come in the front door from the tax payer and go straight out the back door into the shareholders pockets, again, just like the railways.

The money raised by the sale will be used to provide a huge tax relief for wealthy people.

//I predict that within 10 years, most of the shares will be owned by foreigners, we will no longer have a daily post through our letter boxes, and the present arrangement of the same price for a letter, no matter where it is going to in Britain will be a distant memory//

Not without a change of statute. That will be down to the government of the time.

Physical Post has had it's day mate. Move on and put your cudgel away.
"Physical Post has had it's day mate."

I was just thinking that this morning as I put out the recycling bin full of, among other things, unsolicited physical post.
Clumsily typed by me ...the only way that the new, foreign-owned Royal Mail will be able to continue to offer the universal price will be by having lashings of subsidy, just like the railways. They may have the subsidy anyway, as lots of the postal system is difficult to make money from at the best of times. Collecting from remote rural postboxes is never going to be very profitable, nor delivering letter to such places.

If what you say, physical post, or real letters, have had their day, then anybody buying into this new privatised company will have bought a pig in a poke. Most of the mail coming through our letterboxes are not birthday cards from Auntie. They are direct mailing, or junk mail as most of us know it as. This is already charged at ludicrously low prices by the present company.
Question Author
Ymb,

I do not remember any privatised national asset being overpriced and under subscribed. They are usually sold for a fraction of there real worth (the postal service for example) and investors are not in short supply.
Svejk, the scandal with Blue Arrow was nothing to with privatisation; the company was always private; but a bank. NatWest's security department covered up the fact that £837 million of new stock, issued to finance a takeover by the company, had failed.

The only way investors in a privatisation could ever get their money back is if the promoters, the government, had knowingly made false representations in the prospectus and so the shares were worthless in fact but would have been of value had the representations been true. When has that ever happened?
Got the name of the sell-off wrong Fred (I did put a question mark)
And yes, I seem to remember them claiming the shares were over-valued by the Government. It still seems to be a 'heads we win, tails you lose' form of speculation.
In that case svejk, let's all have a go. Some investor may sue for his money back and win, in which case we will all get our money back; we can't lose on buying shares at the issue price, can we, in such circumstances?

Of course, the share might fall below issue price in due course anyway, without any falsity in the prospectus, but that's a risk we all take. We can't sue for that.
Well I'm glad you agree with me, for once, Fred. I think????
will not be long and it will be £1 to send a letter to the next street
Curiously both DHL and FedEx have recently reported a downturn in profits which they ascribe to companies opting for traditional but slower means of sending packets. There may be hope for Royal Mail yet. But their problem has been that dealing with ordinary letters is not really profitable and people have largely stopped sending letters when that can be avoided.
Svejk, yes I agree. We can all take advantage of the law to recover any losses and, if someone else does it for us first, we are well in.
Another word for all joining in might be Snouts in the Trough.

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