Read Online Private Island: Why Britian Now Belongs to Someone Else by James Meek - Free Book Online
Authors: James Meek
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that are doomed to fade away (‘60,000 people since 2002 is nothing!’ Buswell snorted when I mentioned how far Royal Mail had already slimmed down), as to prevent the degradation of the jobs that remain: to prevent the job of postman from becoming something like a child’s paper round. ‘In real terms, now, “postman” should be a part-time job,’ Buswell said. ‘If you look at the cost of sorting by hand it’s about 2p a letter; by machine, it’s 0.1p a letter. Unfortunately that’s the way it’s going to go. The actual job the postman does in the near future is just delivering. They will deliver for four or five hours and that’s done.’
I got a pretty clear line when I phoned Muck, but I had to call my contacts on the island several times while lambs and grandchildren were dealt with. Muck only gets mail four times a week, and I wondered if they minded. ‘It seems very reasonable,’ saidLawrence MacEwen, whose family owns the island. ‘I would even be quite happy if we had less. About three times a week is probably plenty.’
According to law, the Royal Mail must empty each of Britain’s 115,000 postboxes and deliver any letter to any of Britain’s 28 million addresses, six days a week, at the same, affordable price, wherever the letter is posted and wherever it’s going. The rule’s the same for parcels, except with them it’s only five days a week. This is the universal service obligation, the USO – ‘part of our economic and social glue’, as Richard Hooper put it in the reports that framed the debate over Royal Mail privatisation.
There have always been a few exceptions. Muck, a Scottish island two and a half miles long to the south of Skye, is one. There are twelve households on Muck and they get mail when and if the ferry arrives from Mallaig. ‘Obviously we are very expensive to the Royal Mail to deliver to,’ MacEwen said. Bad weather can cut the ferries down to one a week in winter. There have also been times when the MacEwens put a first-class letter on the early ferry and it reached London the next morning. But Muck now has a satellite dish for broadband Internet. You can even catch a mobile signal in some parts of the island. ‘Nowadays email’s so important for communication that the post is getting less and less important,’ MacEwen said. ‘I’m afraid the Royal Mail’s in a losing battle.’
If the battle is about keeping the USO – and that is the way Hooper put it – it is underway. At the other end of the British archipelago from Muck, the postal service on Jersey, where Anthony Trollope carried out the first trials of pillar boxes in 1852, announced in 2011 that it was abandoning Saturday deliveries in an attempt to staunch the flow of red on its balance sheet. Five days a week is the current Europe-wide minimum for the USO, according to the most recent postal directive from Brussels. But the then TNT lobbied hard to get that minimum reduced. In 2010 Pieter Kunz, then head of TNT’s European mail operations, described the USO as ‘a kind of Jurassic Park,and we should get rid of it.’ It is easy to imagine, a few years from now, the right-wing British media blaming Eurocrats for cutting the number of weekly deliveries – ‘BRUSSELS SOUNDS LAST POST FOR DAILY MAIL’ – and the private Royal Mail, with quiet relief, following the Dutch lead. ‘If TNT has its way, five days would be reduced to three,’ said John Baldwin, the CWU’s head of international affairs. ‘TNT is the bogeyman of the postal industry but they are not alone. Royal Mail, frankly, isn’t going to argue if it’s going to be released from the five-day obligation.’
Richard Hooper’s first report recommending part-privatisation of the Royal Mail was produced for Labour in 2008; the second, endorsing a sale or flotation, for the Con-Dem coalition in 2010. Both said modernisation and privatisation were essential to stop Royal Mail going bust and to save the USO. Hooper One was
I got a pretty clear line when I phoned Muck, but I had to call my contacts on the island several times while lambs and grandchildren were dealt with. Muck only gets mail four times a week, and I wondered if they minded. ‘It seems very reasonable,’ saidLawrence MacEwen, whose family owns the island. ‘I would even be quite happy if we had less. About three times a week is probably plenty.’
According to law, the Royal Mail must empty each of Britain’s 115,000 postboxes and deliver any letter to any of Britain’s 28 million addresses, six days a week, at the same, affordable price, wherever the letter is posted and wherever it’s going. The rule’s the same for parcels, except with them it’s only five days a week. This is the universal service obligation, the USO – ‘part of our economic and social glue’, as Richard Hooper put it in the reports that framed the debate over Royal Mail privatisation.
There have always been a few exceptions. Muck, a Scottish island two and a half miles long to the south of Skye, is one. There are twelve households on Muck and they get mail when and if the ferry arrives from Mallaig. ‘Obviously we are very expensive to the Royal Mail to deliver to,’ MacEwen said. Bad weather can cut the ferries down to one a week in winter. There have also been times when the MacEwens put a first-class letter on the early ferry and it reached London the next morning. But Muck now has a satellite dish for broadband Internet. You can even catch a mobile signal in some parts of the island. ‘Nowadays email’s so important for communication that the post is getting less and less important,’ MacEwen said. ‘I’m afraid the Royal Mail’s in a losing battle.’
If the battle is about keeping the USO – and that is the way Hooper put it – it is underway. At the other end of the British archipelago from Muck, the postal service on Jersey, where Anthony Trollope carried out the first trials of pillar boxes in 1852, announced in 2011 that it was abandoning Saturday deliveries in an attempt to staunch the flow of red on its balance sheet. Five days a week is the current Europe-wide minimum for the USO, according to the most recent postal directive from Brussels. But the then TNT lobbied hard to get that minimum reduced. In 2010 Pieter Kunz, then head of TNT’s European mail operations, described the USO as ‘a kind of Jurassic Park,and we should get rid of it.’ It is easy to imagine, a few years from now, the right-wing British media blaming Eurocrats for cutting the number of weekly deliveries – ‘BRUSSELS SOUNDS LAST POST FOR DAILY MAIL’ – and the private Royal Mail, with quiet relief, following the Dutch lead. ‘If TNT has its way, five days would be reduced to three,’ said John Baldwin, the CWU’s head of international affairs. ‘TNT is the bogeyman of the postal industry but they are not alone. Royal Mail, frankly, isn’t going to argue if it’s going to be released from the five-day obligation.’
Richard Hooper’s first report recommending part-privatisation of the Royal Mail was produced for Labour in 2008; the second, endorsing a sale or flotation, for the Con-Dem coalition in 2010. Both said modernisation and privatisation were essential to stop Royal Mail going bust and to save the USO. Hooper One was
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