The British economy was most successful when it was run in the national interest.
From the end of April, the 500-year-old Royal Mail, which Margaret Thatcher refused to privatise, will be controlled by Daniel Kretinsky, a Czech billionaire who is co-owner of one football club, Sparta Prague, and an investor in another, West Ham United. Perhaps British stamps will soon carry the Hammers logo rather than the King’s head. The Labour government is allowing the £3.6bn takeover to take place as a global trade war rages and Britain’s control of its national infrastructure becomes ever more critical. Keir Starmer says the “world as we knew it has gone”, as if we didn’t know. The second Trump administration is merely accelerating the ongoing fragmentation of market-driven globalisation.
In a speech in 2015, Kretinsky (aka the “Czech sphinx”) said that his aim was to make money from dying industries. The decline of the Royal Mail was not inevitable, however. It has been the strategic choice of successive governments: as business secretary in the austerity-fixated coalition, Vince Cable led the privatisation of the postal service, creating the conditions for its present malaise. Much of Britain’s critical national infrastructure is already owned by foreign speculators and nation states. I am often told, when I raise this with politicians, that what matters is not the ultimate ownership of a company or national asset but where the R&D is located. But as the historian David Edgerton has written, the United Kingdom in the postwar period once pursued a distinctive form of national capitalism. “This national industry supplied the British people with nearly all their common infrastructure – railways, roads and energy – as well as their cars, TVs, aeroplanes and clothes.” Today, raw sewage is poured into rivers by water companies owned by overseas firms. Letters are sent but are delayed or never arrive (I have had no post for nearly two weeks). Our disaggregated rail network is the most expensive for passengers in Europe. Decades of careless misrule have weakened Britain’s national infrastructure and left us wide open to threats from hostile powers as the world darkens. The slow death of the Royal Mail is a parable of the modern British state.
In the age of media gigantism and the tyranny of the algorithm, one admires the innovation and restless spirit of the sole trader. Jacob Furedi, former deputy editor of UnHerd, has launched a new online magazine, Dispatch, which is committed to reporting from the neglected “frontiers” of Britain and beyond. It has one member of staff: Furedi. The launch piece is a damning investigation into what he calls “Britain’s opioid crisis” – the result of months of research and FOI requests – which is spreading across the UK, from Cornwall to the Shetland Islands. It reports on a new type of killer opioid, even more dangerous than fentanyl.
I noted Nicholas Royle’s letter replying to my column about James Graham, the triumph of the screen and the marginalisation of the literary novel. He is correct that there is no literary ecosystem to support the short story in Britain. In truth, there always seems to be many more writers of short fiction than readers of it. When I was Granta editor from 2007 to 2008, I was inundated by short stories sent in by aspiring novelists, many with creative writing MAs. The manuscripts would be piled high in toppling towers in the corner of our Holland Park office. There was no evidence that any of these would-be contributors subscribed to the magazine. Here, I thought, was another instance of elite overproduction: postgraduates were being prepared (and charged tuition fees) for a world that did not exist. (Coda: in the mid 1990s I bought an intriguing novel by Mr Royle from Waterstones on Milsom Street in Bath: Counterparts, published by an enterprising independent, Barrington Books. I still have it. But that was another time, a different world.)