It's great news that the Government has withdrawn its plans to part-privatise Royal Mail and to introduce Identity Cards. Neither policy made sense; both were deeply unpopular.
I, and many other MPs, have been lobbying Ministers all year on both these issues and I was beginning to despair that the Government was refusing to look again at these, so I'm delighted with this news.
Royal Mail
This will preserve the Universal Postal Service which is so valued.
There's no doubt that Royal Mail has major problems (a £20 billion deficit on its pension fund, with only £10 billion assets; a poor record of industrial relations in recent years) but even so it is more profitable than its German equivalent and more efficient than the privatised TNT.
Furthermore there was no evidence that privatised management would have any new ideas about tackling its undoubted problems. Indeed it has had two managers (in Allan Leighton and Adam Crozier, Chairman and Chief Executive) for some years, considered by many to be top class managers from the private sector, and they've failed to solve the problems.
What needs to happen now is for there to be serious talks between the Unions and Management (as the Unions have been asking for) and in return there has got to be an end to strikes. The problems will only be solved by open-ended discussions by all parties, including the Government as the only shareholder.
ID Cards
This was a daft and unpopular policy which has already cost the best part of £1 billion and would have cost many times that - to no good end.
The problem was never the card itself (most of us have several cards in our pockets from banks etc), it was always the National Data Base to which the card gave access and which was going to hold all public information on every card holder (uncheckable and inevitably, containing much wrong information).
Huge Government corporate projects have a bad track record. This was never going to do all the things the Government claimed (solve international fraud, crack down on terrorism, etc).
I'm pleased common sense has prevailed.