Royal Mail has been heading for collapse for years. Now it can't even deliver my Christmas present Polly Toynbee

[TrueBlueTerrier]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... as-present

It’s too late to reverse this disastrous privatisation, but regulators can be made to enforce its contracts to the letter

It was nice of Royal Mail to send me a message. “Delivered”, it said. To prove it, there was a photo of my parcel on the doorstep. Except it wasn’t my front door, or anything like it, but some kind of white marble flooring inside a block of flats. And there was no parcel on my doorstep.

Trying to find a Royal Mail number to call is difficult, as with most companies. Try calling and after interminable options, it says go back online or the wait will be 20 minutes. The website carries a series of frequently asked questions – none of which matched mine.

So I cheated. I found a press office email, explained my vanished parcel and said I was planning a column on Royal Mail’s troubles: true, as I’ve been intending to do this one for a while. “Our customer service team is investigating,” said a press officer. Next day, the chairman and chief executive’s office wrote to me, promising to “make every effort to recover the item”. So far, at the time of writing, my granddaughter’s present is still lost in the post, or under someone else’s Christmas tree.


Royal Mail is yet another disaster privatisation, a great national utility sacrificed to relentlessly persistent Thatcherite ideology. Last year, it made a £1bn loss. First-class stamps cost a monster £1.25 each, Ofcom having allowed repeated recent rises. Screwing down its staff caused 18 days of strikes, costing the company £200m. It was so badly handled that its chief executive and other senior staff left the company soon after.

What was the coalition government thinking, when it sold Royal Mail off in 2013 – long after rail, water and energy had become scandalous failures? It, too, was sold off at a knockdown price – the National Audit Office said it was at least £750m too cheap.

Energy company Bulb looked set to make a fortune, until it went bust in 2021, falling back on a massive state guarantee of £6.5bn. Railtrack collapsed into renationalisation, while railway companies are tumbling back towards state ownership. Gordon Brown’s weird part-privatisation of the London tube collapsed in expensive ignominy. Water companies paid out unaffordable profits to shareholders, underspending on leaks, which are now spewing sewage into rivers and coast.

Consider the pointless destructiveness of Royal Mail’s disintegration. It has an onerous but magnificent obligation to deliver letters and parcels for the same price to each of the realm’s 30m households six days a week, out to far-flung bothies and across waterways. Its place in national life includes Postman Pat and novelist Anthony Trollope (who invented the letterbox), riding the country on horseback for years to set the service up. The everyday postie watching out for elderly people is a social service.


With that obligation came an essential monopoly, which was broken. Now see the avalanche of delivery companies crisscrossing each other, over, and over, to deliver parcels to the same front doors. In Sorry We Missed You, the film-maker Ken Loach graphically portrayed the underpaid, bogus-self-employed hardship of those delivery drivers, with no toilet breaks or meals. Think of the needless carbon emissions and congestion.

For the crucial final mile of deliveries – the mile that costs most to operate – it should be quite enough for every household to get just one delivery a day of letters and parcels. But last month, Royal Mail even lost its monopoly on delivering its own parcels from Post Office branches.

Since last year, Royal Mail has cut 10,000 jobs. And it’s no surprise that there are high sickness rates, since posties walk eight to 12 miles a day in all weather, for which they’re paid between £25,000 and £30,000. No doubt one of its 16,000 Christmas temps mis-delivered my parcel – my regular never would.

It would make no sense for Labour to spend billions it doesn’t have to buy back our great national utilities. But it can make regulators enforce their contracts to the letter, with serious fines for noncompliance. As the Guardian’s financial editor, Nils Pratley, points out, Royal Mail’s £5.6m fine for delivering only 82% of first-class letters on time was tiny, considering its £7.4bn revenues. If water, rail and energy firms can’t fulfil their contracts, they must go bust and fall back to the state. If Royal Mail can’t comply then it should return to public ownership. Complex to arrange, but restoring its monopoly on the daily delivery of parcels would raise enough profits to modernise and pay enough staff decently. Hard to fine-tune but not beyond the wit of a good government.

Meanwhile, I’m still waiting for my granddaughter’s present to be delivered.

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

[TrueBlueTerrier]

Polly Toynbee on Royal Mail’s Decline: The Consequence of Failed Privatization

https://bnnbreaking.com/world/uk/polly- ... atization/

Just days before Christmas, Polly Toynbee finds herself in the midst of an all too familiar predicament – a misdelivered Christmas present intended for her granddaughter. A simple yet significant example of the decreasing efficiency of the Royal Mail, which, according to Toynbee, is a direct result of its privatization.

The Downfall of Privatization
Toynbee’s criticism of Royal Mail’s privatization comes in the wake of the company’s £1 billion loss last year, increased stamp prices, and most notably, the impact of staff strikes. Her scrutiny, however, extends beyond the Royal Mail, enveloping the successive privatizations of UK national utilities, including energy, rail, and water services. These, she argues, have often led to failures and subsequent re-nationalizations, signaling the inefficiency of the privatization process.

A Historical Significance in Decline
Among these utilities, the Royal Mail holds a unique historical significance and social value. For Toynbee, the unnecessary breaking of its monopoly has led to numerous inefficiencies. The company has cut 10,000 jobs and faces high sickness rates among staff due to demanding work conditions.

Re-Nationalization: A Costly Affair
Despite the evident shortcomings of privatization, Toynbee argues against re-nationalization. The primary reason being the cost associated with it. However, she does advocate for stricter enforcement of contracts by regulators and suggests a return to public ownership if compliance fails to materialize.

A Possible Solution
Toynbee proposes a solution that could potentially restore Royal Mail’s former glory – the reinstatement of its monopoly on daily parcel deliveries. This, she believes, could fund modernization efforts and ensure fair staff wages. However, such a move would require careful implementation by an effective government.

As the article concludes, we find Toynbee still awaiting her granddaughter’s misdelivered Christmas present, a tangible symbol of Royal Mail’s failing service in the wake of its privatization.

[Mr Rush]

Polly Toynbee on Royal Mail’s Decline: The Consequence of Failed Privatization
[...]

This reads like one of those textbooks you get for English revision that gives you all the talking points about the book in question. I feel I can now write a textual analysis essay on Polly Toynbee's column that will get a passing grade.

[clashcityrocker]

This reads like one of those textbooks you get for English revision that gives you all the talking points about the book in question. I feel I can now write a textual analysis essay on Polly Toynbee's column that will get a passing grade.

You've got 3 days off.
Knock yourself out. Amuse us.

[tramssirhc]

Could this be the same Tonybee who once wrote an 'article' telling worker's on poverty wages that striking was not the way to secure higher wages? This is a person so fraudulent she uses Polly as her name. Quite happy to lecture the rest of us from a position of extreme wealth which enabled her to whirl about making decisions that have left her bitter and twisted. There is nothing this horrible liberal can provide to the working class.

[Tman]

You're not supposed to think like that. The Grauniad is the paper for all sensible right-thinking people, and it's staffers are of the highest intellectual standards, as they say themselves.
Afua Hirsh, the hypocrite Toynbee and the part-time radical Owen Jones (among others) prove that.

[baldrick]

So the privatised Royal Mail is doing better than when it was owned by the British people?

[Jack1960]

Could this be the same Tonybee who once wrote an 'article' telling worker's on poverty wages that striking was not the way to secure higher wages? This is a person so fraudulent she uses Polly as her name. Quite happy to lecture the rest of us from a position of extreme wealth which enabled her to whirl about making decisions that have left her bitter and twisted. There is nothing this horrible liberal can provide to the working class.

As Richard Littlejohn brilliantly reminded her on question time a few years back.

[claretandblue]

The same Toynbee who writes her column from the south of France?

[guardianangel]

And what is anyone going to do about it......NOWT

[Tman]

Not much you can do about champagne socialists, as the frauds are everywhere.