Post, post

After a couple of recent blogs on nuclear war and Brexit now onto the real big issue of the our time. The running down of the Royal Mail.

My two local post boxes now have their final collection at 0900, or 0700 on a Saturday. Meaning a first class stamp, price soon to be a staggering £1.80, will almost certainly mean that a letter posted on a Saturday won’t even be collected from the post box until Monday. The day, in the not so distant past, you might well have expected it to arrive.

Meanwhile the supposedly regulated mail monopoly operator in the UK is lobbying endlessly to cut services further and increase prices higher.

Quite how a company which has a duty to be able to deliver to every property in the country every day cannot compete in an age when mailing shopping to all and sundry is one of the world’s growth industries it is hard to fathom.

But this is obviously a viscous circle and one we have seen many times in the last 40 years. The Royal Mail was privatised in 2015 after 500 years of public ownership and what a difference it has made.

Removing the “dead hand” of state control has not led to a better service, lower prices, and improved products. Rather ever since it has been running itself down, failing to meet targets, treating its workers badly to cut costs, treating its customers even worse and being bled for money.

I have always thought the Royal Mail was a necessity in a country because the towns and cities where delivering the mail was easy and dirt cheap, subsidised the expense of maintaining contact with Orkney or the Scilly islands. Without which such areas would experience even greater decline and marginalisation.

You might say that there are a dozen delivery companies that are competing with the Royal Mail and all areas of the country are covered quite adequately, but at what cost?

Once the Royal Mail goes, they will charge what they want, deliver when they want and in many areas businesses will be unable to afford to do business. We will all pay for that in rural decline and regional inequality.

Yet the government seems to be eager to placate and appease the Royal Mail, when they should be forcing it to do the job it is obliged by law to do and do it properly.

Otherwise like many other privatisations it will just become the plaything of the hedge funds and the private investors, deliberately run down, allowed to fail, be squeezed for its huge property values and left with massive debts.

Post privatisation, the last post is playing for the post.

Jonty’s Jotting

From Jonty Bloom Media Ltd

Economics, trade and Brexit, not necessarily in that order but the dog always comes first.