Yesterday I wrote here that management’s refusal to go to ACAS unless the possibility of a national strike is first lifted indicated what was wrong with the way the Royal Mail is handling industrial relations in the industry.

I have just caught the end of Peter Mandelson’s statement to the House of Lords on the postal dispute. Rather than step in to try to get management to ACAS, Lord Mandelson unfortunately echoed the management line over ACAS.

The BBC’s reporter from Parliament, reviewing Peter Mandelson’s performance, said that “it’s clear that his sentiments lie with them [Royal Mail management] and not with the Communication Workers Union.” Indeed.

Peter Mandelson’s approach is to force the debate through what he sees as the prism of modernisation. But modernisation can mean many things. Though the workforce and its union is regularly represented as an obstacle to a modernised company Royal Mail group profits doubled from £162 million in 2008 to £321m this year. Moreover, a modern approach, rather than one that took us back to failed macho management techniques and privatisation of the 1980s and 1990s, would look to build on the strong profits that the workforce have helped to deliver to agree change based as much as possible on consensus.  The real problem is that, far from not having an agreed framework, management have walked away from the next phase of an agreement secured in 2007.

The CWU argues that employees are now being singled out, threatened with disciplinary action or suspended, or being “removed from pay” as part of a process in which managers seek to impose new work rates and extra duties which have not been agreed or approved in any recognised manner.

This new dynamic is what led to the growth during the year of local strikes and disputes. The sheer number of these has led, inexorably, to a national ballot. The union argues that it wants modernisation of the postal service but that that this should be established through agreement, not imposed or through a regime of localised and unreasonable, sudden, changes to working conditions.

The Department for Business, Industry and Skills has become an outpost for a policy that is leading the whole of the government into a dead end. If the department will not change tack, starting with getting the Royal Mail to ACAS without the unecessary conditions it has chosen to impose, then Cabinet ministers who disagree with what is happening and other members of the government, alongside Labour MPs, should be looking for ways to have it overruled.

If they do not then the department’s handling of this dispute risks damaging the entire government and, by extension, the chances of winning the next election.