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The power of media magnates - often foreign nationals and UK tax exiles - to create right wing agendas sympathetic to their personal ideologies or commercial interests is now a major concern for most Britons. Trust in the media, not just politicians, is extremely low as is demonstrated by consistent opinion polling. Too often, news outlets are visibly and crudely creating the news agenda, not reporting it.

The doubling of profits announced by Royal Mail today must end the call for part-privatisation of Britain's postal services.

As much as £3.5 billion of public money could be saved in back offices alone and services dramatically improved if the Government followed the example of one local authority which put its faith in council workers and their trade union, claims a new report to be launched by Compass at a debate in Parliament today.

Today Compass issued figures on the sale of Royal mail showing that it would raise £900 million less than just a year ago, with a sale price of just £1 billion - compared to the £630 million it could make every year in the public sector.

The case has not been made that Royal Mail should be part privatised but even if it had now is the wrong time to sell up to 49% of it.

When Lord Mandelson stands up later today to deliver what will probably be a terminal body blow to an already weakened Royal Mail, it will be a tale of two deficits.

"In Government We Trust: the delusions of privatisation" is an interesting title for a book but what does this mean? Well this is what an audience of over 100 came to discuss at last night's event. The event started with a discussion by one of the authors of the book, Warrick Funnel.

We're pleased with the widespread media coverage of our forthcoming campaign on postal services, this has been reported in The Sunday Times, on the front page of Saturday's Independent and in The Telegraph. Compass strongly rejects the proposal that our post service should be part-privatised, instead of selling off this national asset we'd like to see the service invested in and modernised to ensure it is responsive to people's needs in the 21st century and remains a universal service that is publicly owned. In essence we believe that we need "modernisation not marketisation".

Right now the political agenda is dominated by the issue of market failure. But the focus will shift. The other side of the market failure coin is state failure. Free market ideology took its tight grip on British politics at the end of the 1970s precisely because of the failure of the state to modernise itself.It had become too centralised, bureaucratic and sclerotic. But the old state hung on and is still failing to deliver.

The public service reform agenda cannot succeed simply by the top down imposition of centralised targets or more market based choice. In our latest report "Co-production: the modernisation of public services by staff and users" we discuss the formation of a new public service reform paradigm based on the principle and practice of co-production.