Last year's Royal Mail strikes responsded to an ongoing attack on postal workers' conditions, the origins of which can be traced directly to the competitve, 'harmonized' market being gradually introduced under the EU Postal Directives of 1997 and 2002.  The threatened closure of post offices across the UK also falls within the Directives' market logic.  (It remains to be seen if local post office user campaigns, whose bandwagon now groans under the weight of Ken Livingstone and a posse of embarrassed/embarrassing Labour MPs, will manage to organize in solidarity with the Royal Mail workers.)  This Private Eye squib mentions the workers only in passing and the Directives not at all, but it draws attention to an important mediating stage in the restructuring: the banker-run Shareholder Executive, created in 2002 to subject the UK's remaining state-owned companies to the ultra-short-term criteria of 'shareholder value'

Shareholder Executive
BIG CHEQUES IN THE POST

Where did the ruthlessly commercial approach to Britain's post offices, and with it the massive closure programme, come from?