RM has no future without a return to some Victorian values

[TrueBlueTerrier]

Royal Mail has no future without a return to some Victorian values http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/ ... alues.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

The trade unions destroyed its ability to harness technology and provide a public service. This privatisation is necessary and overdue, but a bit sad

In the same week that the privatisation of the Royal Mail was announced, so was the flotation of Twitter. The former is thought to be worth £3 billion, the latter £6 billion. So the best-known and oldest communication “brand” in British history carries only half the value of a social networking service which started life six years ago.

How have we got here? Like most British people, I am strongly attached to the idea of the Royal Mail. The great novelist Anthony Trollope, who worked for the Post Office for 33 years and introduced the first post box, felt what he called “a thorough love of letters”. So do I (apart from junk mail). I still write a good many of the things (roughly 15 a week, not including office ones), so I am interested by the changes.

In London at the beginning of the 20th century, many postal districts managed 12 deliveries a day, the first at 7.15am, the last at 8.30pm. The plots of novels and police investigations often turned on the certainty of postal delivery times.

Even in my own childhood in the 1960s, the times of the two daily deliveries were absolutely regular. The man delivering always wore a cap and uniform and collected the letters we had put out for posting on the hall table (no need, then, to lock the door).
Today, the service has sunk to one delivery a day (and no collection on Sundays). When this happened, you may remember, it was described as “abolishing the second post”, but actually it was abolishing the first. The single post since then has frequently arrived in the afternoon. It often contains letters posted, first-class, five or six days earlier. From 1840 until 1918, a letter cost one old penny. Today a first-class letter costs 144 old pennies (60p). Even when you allow for inflation, we are getting a lot less for a lot more.

When the Communication Workers Union tugs at our heart-strings about the destruction of a great national public service, one should ask it who has been the agent of that destruction. As with the print unions in old Fleet Street, once-proud skills gradually became restrictive practices and organised obstruction. The unions are right that the Royal Mail was an extraordinary cultural achievement; why, then, have they trashed it? All through my life, it has got consistently worse.

The history of communications is not a usually a creditable one for governments. In essence, they have tried to control them, either in order to snoop on us or to grab money, or both. Until Rowland Hill came along and drove forward the famed Penny Post, the Post Office (which, as is no longer the case, controlled the Royal Mail) was essentially a tax authority, and stamps were the tax. Like HMRC today, its job was to get money out of the public.

Contrary to what you read when Royal Mail privatisation is assailed, Hill did not want a monolithic nationalised industry. He was a free trader, and he saw the postal monopoly as “an offence” which should be removed from the statute book. His vision for the mail was revolutionary because he wanted it, for the first time, to serve the public rather than the exchequer. That meant providing a prompt, universal service where the delivery was assured.

The dedication to this was astonishing. From 1851, for two years, Trollope traversed the whole of the west of England and south Wales, managing 40 miles a day on horseback. He would ride up to people and say, abruptly: “Good morning, sir. I am a surveyor of the Post Office. How do you get your letters?” Then he would note down every account in a pocket-book. He came to understand the country through what he called “minuteness”. It was while visiting Salisbury on this business that he conceived his wonderful Barsetshire novels. The Post Office’s minuteness was such that a regular and honest Royal Mail service did eventually reach every part of the United Kingdom.

Perhaps the Royal Mail was the victim of its own Victorian success. The red livery, the sovereign’s head on the stamps, the ubiquity of the pillar box, all spoke of trust. Post offices even became the repository for national savings. Like public health or national currency or sewage systems, communications were a successful part of the public sphere. The idea of good government seemed a practical reality. And so the government did not relinquish control; indeed, the Post Office remained a government department until 1969. When a new technology in the field came along, it seemed natural to the authorities to swallow it up. In 1870, private telegraph companies were nationalised. In 1912, the same thing was done to telephones, bringing them under the Post Office.

As technology moved faster, and rival nations, especially the United States, permitted much freer competition, Britain started to fall miles behind. One of the many problems of monopoly is that it stops people bothering to innovate. As a boy, I remember hearing that in America local calls were free and telephone bills were itemised. These things seemed inconceivably sophisticated: the British service had got stuck.

The controls, though modified, struggled on into the 1980s. When we bought our first house in 1981, British Telecom – still nationalised, but newly split from the Post Office – told us that it would take six months to have a landline put in. Then came phone privatisation (1984). Before the end of the decade, people had new phones within days, answering machines, faxes, mobile phones. Then came the email. Nowadays, only mouldy old stay-at-homes (like us) bother with landlines. Poor countries skip the landline stage almost entirely: in Afghanistan, where hardly any houses have a conventional phone, the remotest tribesman can wield an iPhone as well as a rifle.

The faster the changes, the more obvious it has become that although a public body may be able to invigilate communication services it cannot run them – just as a government might regulate our roads, but would be crazy to provide the transport for them. Imagine if Eddie Stobart and Norbert Dentressangle and private buses were all banned on grounds of safety or “private greed”, and replaced by “The Road Office” or “National Transport”. No one would consider it for a second. The same applies to communications – even more so, indeed, since they are infinitely more complicated.

One lesson of the story of the Royal Mail is that a publicly provided service can command great loyalty. Even today, when the post plays a much more marginal part in our lives, almost everyone feels that the letter rate common to all parts of the nation is a social good. (The Government is therefore making it a condition of privatisation.) Polls suggest that people instinctively do not feel the same trust in a privatised service. The idea of a commercial company permitted to call itself “Royal” makes us uneasy.

But another lesson is that a public service can do its job successfully only if it maintains strict standards. For this, it must be run on virtually military lines – hence the old postmen’s uniforms, the good conduct stripes on them for “regularity, diligence and fidelity”, the obsession with punctuality. Since the era of trade union power, such standards have been degraded beyond repair; and now the technology has long passed the stage when anything as sclerotic as a nationalised system could even faintly hope to keep up.

This privatisation is necessary and overdue, but a bit sad. The privatisation of telecoms began an exciting new chapter: that of the Royal Mail provides only a melancholy footnote.

[regan]

Ah Charles Moore.
You write like a true 'old Etonian'. Such privilege, to be known by only a handful people in the world. A life set up to be part of the elite from the moment you left the womb. A very different life from your average postie. But there is just one small thing I must mention. Your article is terrible! How much did they pay you to write such a boring and politically self-serving piece of drivel. You mix chunks of 'true blue' reminiscing of the past when everyone knew their place with unsubstantiated and un-referenced rubbish about how the trade unions have ruined your country.
Those days when everything was regimental and all postmen wore a tie and I expect called their betters 'sir'. Got news for you Charlie boy. They may have worn a tie but they would have been in a trade union. Trade unions through their organization created the Labour party which created the NHS and the welfare state, gave decent wages to ordinary decent people and gave them job security and self respect. Your beloved mrs T put paid to all that and you worship the grave she lays under for the great she has done to 'your' britain.
I would never have the slightest interest in reading your book on Thatcher but If I did then your article would certainly sway me against it. Do you have a 'Tory by numbers' article writing kit at home? Go back to the 80s Mr Moore, I think you are more comfortable there.

[Tman]

Funny how these Tory knob-sucks always point to the privatisation of BT (and by association, Thatcher) as the driving force behind it's success, when in actual fact it was System X which revolutionised exchanges etc and which would have come anyway.

Don't see any benefits to the privatisations of the buses, railways, water boards, electricity generators etc either. Trite dogma.

[justdeno]

Their all over paid twats. I should know I know lots of them In the horsey world