Post haste

The sight of massed ranks of public sector workers and Labour backbenchers furiously protesting against a threat of privatisation surely belongs to a past era. Today’s major political trend is in quite the opposite direction, towards nationalisation of banks, and interventions by government in industry to save jobs and avert financial catastrophe. It seems jarringly out of tune with the times for a cabinet minister to be calling for the Royal Mail, a public sector institution woven into the very fabric of national life, to be exposed to the vicissitudes of the market and the profit motives of private investors — possibly foreigners, to boot.

But that is what the business secretary, Lord Mandelson, is proposing: a partial sell-off which is likely to involve partnership with a European postal operator. He has provoked rebellion in his party and division among his Cabinet colleagues. What his opponents refuse to acknowledge, however, is that privatisation is now the only way the British postal service can be saved from atrophying to the point at which it is no longer capable of satisfactorily fulfilling any part of its national role.

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Long starved of adequate investment, poorly managed and held to ransom by a militant workforce, the Royal Mail has already lost much of the public respect it once held. The obligation to provide universal fixed-price delivery to every address in the land is a mighty burden, but the Royal Mail long since ceased to rise to the challenge. Our post arrives later and later, ‘first class’ means no such thing, tens of millions of letters never arrive at all. As the service has deteriorated, so its once-captive customer base has come to rely more and more on email and text-messaging, or on the private-sector parcel and bulk-postal operators that have nibbled away at the Royal Mail’s monopoly.