Royal Fail
If you are reading these lines weeks after the publication of The Communist issue 44, it may have something to do with Royal Mail’s recent abysmal performance.
Frustrations with Royal Mail’s delivery times have reached a point where the private company’s executives have been called to parliament.
The latest of regulator Ofcom’s reports shows that in the first nine months of the financial year, Royal Mail delivered only 77.5 percent of first-class stamped mail by the next-day – against a universal service obligation of 93 percent.
Projected for the rest of the year, this amounts to 126 million missed next-day deliveries – including NHS appointment letters, welfare benefits mails, small business deliveries, and GCSE certificates.
Czech billionaire Daniel Křetínský, who owns Royal Mail, is having a great time though. Despite having to pay over £38 million in fines for missing delivery targets in the past few years, the company made a handsome £12 million in profits for the year 2024-25, through redundancies and price increases.
First-class stamp prices have risen 137 percent since 2020, including a 10p increase effective this April. Second-class services are to become costlier as well.
Concessions from Ofcom – like lowered delivery targets, effective this April – will do little to help posties contending with understaffing and lack of infrastructure. One postie told the BBC that “there aren’t enough vans to go around… you’ll probably end up only doing parcel delivery as that’s where the money is for the company, so we’re told to prioritise those over the mail.”
And yet, Ofcom has reduced nearly £16 million from fines – soothing the poor bosses’ pains. Mollycoddling billionaire parasites with concessions won’t fix the problems with Royal Mail – on the contrary, the blind alley of privatisation is what led to this point!
Yogesh, Edinburgh
Renters’ rights on hold
Since coming to power, Labour have paid lip service to reforming renters’ rights – but with little to show so far.
Millions of renters face mould, dangerous structural issues, lack of essential facilities and more. Within social housing, there is the Decent Homes Standard, a set of minimum criteria that must be met. Labour have now said this will apply to private housing – but it will not be enforced until 2035.
This betrayal is unsurprising. Over 10 percent of MPs make over £10,000 a year from collecting rent. That’s some conflict of interest!
Even if they didn’t postpone extending the standard, would it really have been enforced anyway? Back in 2020, a two-year-old boy died from mould exposure in a council flat in Rochdale, despite his parents reporting the mould time and time again. Fundamentally, nothing has changed since then.
Even now, a recent government report suggests that roughly four out of 10 tenants in social housing report problems with condensation, damp, or mould within their current property.
It’s a similar figure for private renters too. And 77 percent of private renters have reported issues with the quality or condition of their current home.
Only the working class has it in its interests to properly fix the state of housing in Britain.
Dylan O’Connor, Leeds
Mould, fees, and landlords
It is difficult to surprise anyone with stories about mouldy houses and greedy landlords anymore, but sometimes the lust for profit comes as a shock – even to a communist. A recent local story in Birmingham is one of these cases.
Residents in Wakefield Court, Moseley had raised a myriad of problems to the building’s multi-million pound management company, Freshwater Group: broken heating systems, leaking roofs, black mould, and so on.
Eventually, Freshwater decided they would consider fixing some of these issues. Not by making use of their own millions, of course – but by more than tripling residents’ service fees: from £4,112 a year in 2025, to £15,325 by the end of 2026.
This outrageous 272 percent increase has seen residents forced to get a second job, or throw away their life savings, to pay into Freshwaters’ ‘repairs fund’ – all while this desperately needed repair work has not even started!
I am sure this is just one of a thousand similar stories about the housing situation in the UK. When renters’ anger boils over, we will sweep away all of these bastards who have been destroying our lives.
Roman Merker, Birmingham
Polymarket Pandemonium
Conflict, wars, and economic chaos stalk the world market. In a dystopian twist, this barbarism has become monetised by traders.
Polymarket, a trading and betting platform, came into the limelight a few days into 2026 when President Maduro of Venezuela was kidnapped in Caracas by US special forces. Six accounts with no prior activity, set up within days of Maduro’s kidnapping, put a combined stake of $9,807 down on Venezuela-related bets – and made $133,878.
A seventh account piled $32,000 on similar bets, and made over $400,000!
More recently, 12 suspicious accounts made a total profit of $330,000 on predicting the timing of airstrikes on Iran by the US and Israel. Half of the bets came six hours before the strike.
The Democrats have come out scandalised by these betting markets – although, not because they thought betting of this sort was macabre; rather, because this market is leaking sensitive military information to the entire world.
Woe to the ruling class – that such grave information should be leaked, over such a trivial amount of money!
Dillon Lauder, Holloway
Tall tales of war
The war in Ukraine has entered its fourth year – and as expected, the BBC utilised the occasion to amp up their propaganda output for their imperialist masters.
One article, titled ‘Why Ukraine remains defiant and doesn’t feel close to defeat’ argues that Ukraine can continue to fight indefinitely with plucky spirit and gumption.
The actual content of the article falls flat in this regard. Strikingly, many of the interviews of Ukrainian citizens show people worn down by the continual destruction of their country, and loss of family members. The temerity of the BBC to turn their genuine pain into gain for British imperialism is truly despicable.
Another article attempts to make the case that Russia is close to collapse. One Russian interviewee laments that a stagnant economy and inflation are making life difficult as the government funnels more resources into the military. Now, where have I heard that before!
It seems that the supposed haven of liberal democracy that is Western Europe is in the same boat – except ‘ours’ is sinking at a far faster rate, with extra torpedoes hurtling from the Strait of Hormuz into our hull.
All bluster and lies aside, the balance of forces is clear.
Russia’s war economy will continue to grind away in Ukraine until the likes of Macron, Starmer and Merz can no longer afford to keep feeding Ukrainian workers into the meat grinder. With the West facing humiliating defeat in Iran, that may come sooner than Zelenskyy, the European leaders or the BBC imagine.
Sam Lovesey, Manchester
