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

Netherlands and Germany, protected their old postal firms by giving them complete commercial freedom long before they had to compete with rivals – privatisation first, to prepare for liberalisation – Britain did it the other way round: liberalisation first,privatisation later. What this meant was that Britain’s rules for who could deliver what mail, and for how much – rules that were supposed to protect plucky, nimble entrepreneurs from the pampered monopolistic dinosaur that was Royal Mail – were of most benefit to the only marginally less pampered private monopolies of the Continent. By trying to prevent the small mammals of the postal world getting squashed by the Royal Mail brontosaurus, Labour and their advisers exposed Royal Mail to the raptors of TNT and Deutsche Post, aka DHL.
    I asked Martin Stanley, the former civil servant Labour put in charge of exposing Royal Mail to competition from 2000 to 2004, why Britain did it before everyone else in Europe. ‘Unilateral disarmament,’ he said. ‘If we hadn’t disarmed first, it would have taken Western Europe much longer to do it. Deutsche Post and TNT didn’t face serious competition in their home countries. They were portrayed as these great privatised companies but they were not competing in the bulk mail business, they were simply making huge profits. British policy was, if we don’t open up, nobody will.’
    Then surely, I said, letting other countries’ monopolies take market share from a British monopoly, when the British monopoly couldn’t do the same in Holland or Germany, wasn’t fair competition?
    ‘I don’t think we could have said we have a UK competitor but not a German one,’ Stanley replied. ‘What really matters is that mail is posted, collected, sorted, transported and delivered by British people: always has been, always will be. Ownership of the company is irrelevant. If we hadn’t come along and woken up Royal Mail in the way we did, Royal Mail would now be a horrible basket case.’
    Except that a horrible basket case is exactly what Royal Mail did become, according to Richard Hooper, whose successive reports on the organisation – the first appeared in 2008 – gave the government its case for selling the company off. ‘Without serious action,’ Hooper warned, ‘Royal Mail will not survive inits current form and a reduction in the scope and quality of the much loved universal postal service will become inevitable.’
    One day in 1979, a British postal functionary settled down to write a five-page instruction called ‘Trap Doors in Postal Buildings’. He listed five kinds of permissible trap door. A trap door in category B ‘should be strong enough to carry the weight of a man who accidentally steps on the trap door. It must carry a label on self-adhesive vinyl, black on yellow, measuring 250 by 200 mm, saying DO NOT STAND ON THIS TRAP DOOR.’ Who was this far-off bureaucrat? Did a superior send him a memo telling him that there was need for a fresh trap-door instruction? Why? Were they constructing postal buildings in 1979, or postal castles? Was the anonymous official, perhaps, the same person who wrote instruction N02F0024, ‘Vocabulary of Grey Uniform with Corresponding Outer Clothing’, or declared in instruction K07B0400, ‘Clocks’, that ‘Clocks should be provided in cloakrooms that serve more than 50 persons, but not in corridors’?
    In the research department of the Communication Workers Union in Wimbledon, whole yards of shelving are taken up by red folders itemising the postal rites of the past, an encyclopedia of forgotten modalities for any postal occasion. ‘When I joined,’ said John Colbert, now the CWU’s communications and campaigns manager, ‘you were in a classroom for two months, learning all the different acronyms. There was a postal instruction for everything. What every label meant. At the end of it you had a sorting test. If you passed, you became a Substantive Postman. They don’t do