11.04.2012

Extortionate

The coming increases in postage costs are clearly an attempt by the rotten bourgeoisie to destroy the Weekly Worker! Fight-back and get donating, says Robbie Rix

The ridiculous 30% increase in postage due on April 30 will hit the Weekly Worker hard. After having “thought very carefully about the impact on our customers”, Royal Mail decided to raise the cost of a standard first-class stamp from 46p to 60p.

This extortionate rise follows several years of above-inflation price hikes and means it will cost us an extra £7 a year to get the paper to each subscriber. Yes, we all knew how efficiently Royal Mail would work when it was opened up to market competition. And I am sure you agree it will provide even better value once it is finally privatised.

In order as far as possible to avoid passing on the increase to Weekly Worker readers, one dedicated comrade has come up with a partial remedy: he has agreed to provide us with a large loan to buy up enough stamps at current prices to last for the best part of a year. Thank you, comrade TM, not only for thinking of this, but for providing the cash to make it happen.

Most of our web readers are oblivious to such problems. Only a small proportion of them ever contribute to our running costs. Of course, we willingly make the entire paper available to everyone for free, but we are very grateful all the same to those online readers who show their appreciation by getting out that piece of plastic and using our PayPal facility.

There were two such donations last week, both for £20, so thank you, comrades WR and FG. Mind you, I still can’t tell you how many internet readers we had last week due to a technical problem arising from our change of server, but our web experts assure me that all will be well by this time next week!

As well as those two PayPal gifts, we received a total of £65 in standing orders (let me give GD a special mention for his monthly £25), plus three handy cheques - thanks to comrades PJ (£50), MN (£20) and SW (£15 added to his resubscription). All that comes to £190 received over the last seven days, taking our running total for April to £550. But we need £1,500 and we are approaching the halfway mark.

Please help us if you can. Make your donations by post, bank transfer or our website - and if you fancy lending us the odd couple of hundred quid for stamps, just let me know!