Private Island: Why Britian Now Belongs to Someone Else by James Meek Read Free Book Online Page A

towns or summoned a Flevoland out of the sea. Locked in a fractious coalition cabinet where the prime minister’s trump card was his ability to stay awake in late-night meetings longer than any of his quarrelling ministers, van Hulten saw the growing ideological polarisation of Dutch politics, but didn’t realise that the same intellectual currents driving Thatcherite and Reaganite thinkers were at work in the Netherlands. When he took charge of the Dutch post office, it was losing money. His solution was straightforward: he doubled the price of stamps. He still sounds surprised that he was attacked for it from the opposition benches by Neelie Kroes, who accused him of hurting business. His idealism brought him up against the rightist finance minister, Wim Duisenberg, over the post office bank.
    ‘It was one of the richest banks in the Netherlands, 100 per cent owned by the Dutch people,’ van Hulten said. ‘It was my opinion that we should use the money for social purposes … That was a fight I lost. Duisenberg already favoured making the post bank independent of the post office. I did not understand this at the time as a move to privatisation.’ Van Hulten left government and parliament after the 1977 election. His successor, Kroes, set about preparing the ground for the privatisation of the Dutch post office. Not long afterwards, a curious sequence of Nazi-related scandals felled Lubbers’s Christian Democrat rivals – one of them, the ex-postal worker Wim Aantjes, forgot to tell anyone that he had joined the SS during the war in order to get out of forced labour as a postman in Nazi Germany – and Lubbers became prime minister, pushing through postal privatisation with Kroes in 1989. Seven years later the privatised company bought the Australian parcels company TNT and took its name.
    Van Hulten, now in his eighties, is still an activist, an idealist. The privatisation of the mail depressed him; the latest privatisation, of Holland’s local transport networks, made him angry: thethree bus companies supposedly competing in Lelystad, he said, were all owned by the same French firm. ‘Today’s Wednesday, yeah?’ he said. ‘On Wednesday, we have at least six people coming to the door, all bringing some mail. First was the local paper. Then the other local paper. Then the postman comes. Three more will come later. I think that’s the basic defect of post office privatisation. What used to be done by one man is now done by six. They’re all underpaid, and the delivery hasn’t improved. It used to come in the morning, and now I’m still waiting.’
    When the Dutch post office was privatised in 1989, there were reasons to think Lubbers and Kroes had done the organisation a favour. For all their belief in the virtues of the free market, the Dutch were evidently guided by a patriotic sense of national interest when it came to their royal mail. Where Britain sold off the shiniest part of the old Post Office, the telecoms part, as British Telecom in 1984, leaving the mail to fend for itself, the Dutch kept the mail and phones together until 1998, making the company stronger. From 1986 to 1996, when postal services in both countries were making money, the Conservative government borrowed almost all Royal Mail’s profits – £1.25 billion – to fill the holes in Britain’s budget, while the Dutch post office kept its profits and used them to modernise and to buy TNT. In the late 1990s, when email and the Internet began to destroy paper mail and new European rules exposing the old postal services to competition loomed, the Dutch were in the stronger position. In 2000, TNT had become so powerful relative to Royal Mail that the Blair government held secret talks about merging the British postal service with, or selling it to, its Dutch rival.
    That deal fell through. But the regime put in place by New Labour in 2000 to expose Royal Mail to competition had a curious effect. Whereas other European countries, like the