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The privatisation of the Post Office was bound to fail. Like New Labour, it was a triumph of free-market dogma over common sense
Is this a red letter day for Royal Mail? The independent report commissioned by business minister John (“let’s celebrate the rich”) Hutton concluded that privatisation threatens services and brings no benefit to customers.
The creeping commercialisation of postal services is an example of free market dogma triumphing over common sense, creating disillusionment in politics and a growing sense of the loss of social fabric in our communities. It is hitting and hurting Labour in elections as the most vulnerable are left more isolated by closures. And what is more, it makes Gordon Brown’s job of establishing a clear sense of Britishness that much harder, when his policies undermine the status and standing of an institutions that goes a long way to deterring what it means to belong to this nation. So what has the last 10 years been all about?
What has happened to the Royal Mail serves as a symbol for all that is wrong with New Labour. Once you decide that economic efficiency is the means by which you deliver social justice, then the market become master of society. Blairism was built on the notion that the private sector is always more efficient than its public counterpart. To thrive in a global economy and reap the rewards required, the walls between what is private and what is public have to be knocked down. And with big business like TNT lobbying like mad to get into the profits, modernisation only meant the market.
The Tories wanted to privatise the Post Office and were stopped in their tracks for the only time by a clever union campaign that chimed with public concern. New Labour has deftly sidestepped a full-on confrontation and has instead bled the Royal Mail dry of funds while salami slicing the public ethos of this important institution.
The Post Office and our communities are now paying the price in under-investment, closures and the break-up of the service. But there is resistance and it’s not just from the good campaigning work of the post office union the CWU. Campaigns are being run across the country to save services with councils getting in on the act to prop them up. And it’s not even as if going into a post office is any fun. My local office is a misery of long queues and shelves of tatty stationery and cheap DVDs that never made it to general release. The management should be taken to task. But still we hanker for it. Because largely it works. Because it is a point of connection in our communities. Because letters and parcels are precious and we know from our experience of the like of the banks and BT that service in the private sector is often infuriatingly terrible.
Social institutions like the post office matter. They are the places in which values reside and can thrive. The Royal Mail is no bastion of socialism. But it is about universalism, equality, access and public ethos.
As such it serves a purpose to bind our society together. In these fractious and anxious times we should be celebrating such an important institution that builds society – unlike the market that weakens it.
Gordon Brown has said he is in listening mode. Perhaps we should all send him a letter calling on him to keep the Post Office public and invest in it – making its sustainability a litmus test of his ability to change.
