Amazing how Germany insists peremptorily that the whole of the European Community plunge headlong into all the dangerously destabilising pitfalls of the Maastricht treaty, including economic ones that are unworkable, without a second thought, yet when it comes to something simple and straightforward like privatising the phone company, the whole thing is fraught with the most insuperable obstacles: now Posts Minister Christian Schwarz-Schilling says that the plans to privatise the Deutsche Bundepost Telekom are in danger of being derailed, and he is having to draw up an alternative plan in case the unreconstructed corporatists in the Social Democratic Party decide in January to oppose privatisation: according to Reuter, his plan would include spinning off some parts of Bundespost Telekom into separate firms; any such plan could not include any privatisation of standard telephone and postal services; he reckons that the European Community will eventually ban monopolies and comments that That would be twice as bad – we would have a state-run company without the protection offered by it being a monopoly.
