Private Island: Why Britian Now Belongs to Someone Else (6 page)

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 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 in
its 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 none of that no more.'

People have changed. One-time Substantive Postman Colbert, who led a Militant cell in Milton Keynes in the 1980s, talked to me cheerfully about the union hiring a lobbyist who used to work for William Hague, Philip Snape, to press its antiprivatisation case with the coalition. Context has changed too. Even as the old empire of Britain's postal bureaucrats began to
crumble with the split-off of British Telecom under Margaret Thatcher in 1981, a greater threat to traditional mail was forming. By 1982, a hundred thousand executives in the US were wired into a fad called ‘electronic mail'. The office system consultants Urwick Nexos were scornful of this frivolous innovation. ‘Who wants to replace a diary by a thousand pound terminal and have to learn to type in the process?' a consultant sneered. ‘What is wrong with a memo? About 90 per cent of letters are delivered next day and that is fast enough for most requirements. If you want to send an urgent telex you can always go to the telex room with a handwritten note.' By 1985, the word ‘email,' initially spelled with a hyphen, began to replace ‘electronic mail'. The US firm MCI offered a transatlantic service to its American clients. It only took a minute for the sender's email to flash to MCI's state-of-the-art receiving centre in Brussels, where it would be lovingly printed out and hand-carried to its destination by a Belgian postman.

And then everybody learned to type. Before I started researching the mails, I thought about trying to set up interviews by post. I didn't think about it very long. I sent no letters, and received none. I phoned, emailed, texted, Skyped, Vibered, Gmail chatted and Googled. By Easter, I'd only just used the last of my Christmas stamps. I sent a card to a friend to thank her for dinner and she emailed back to thank me for my thank you. The morning I wrote this, my post consisted of a bank statement and a credit card statement (which, as my bank keeps telling me – ‘Go paperless!' – I don't need), and a card from Ed Miliband urging me to go online to tell him my priorities for moving Britain forward.

Just after the turn of the millennium the growth in the amount of mail being sent became decoupled from the peaks and troughs of economic growth. The economy boomed, but the rate of increase in paper mail fell as email, text messages, web chat and the Internet in general erased old paper trails. In 2005, the letters market went into absolute decline, and has fallen ever
since. By 2015, according to the Hooper reports, letter volumes are likely to decline by another 25 to 40 per cent.

Technological shifts are nothing new. In the late eighteenth century, new media meant horse-drawn mail coaches flashing information up and down the country, in the form of newspapers, at the blinding speed of six and a half miles an hour. Fifty years later, the railways came along, and, presumably, a lot of disgruntled mail-coach drivers found themselves looking for alternative employment. What is different this time is that text has broken free of the requirement for it to take material form, and for a human hand, at some point, to feel its weight.

There aren't many large factories in the heart of London. Perhaps Mount Pleasant, hunched battleship-grey on a street corner in Clerkenwell, is the last. When I went there recently more than 1,700 people were employed in this decrepit postal Gormenghast, breathing the ancient institutional smell of its stairwells, treading the worn parquet flooring and flicking paper into dark pigeonholes to the cacophony of clashing music stations. If any postal building had trap doors, surely it was this one.

When in 1889 the Post Office took over the debtors' prison that stood on the site, it didn't demolish the whole jail at once, but edged in beside it, like an impecunious lodger renting half a bed. The building was flooded in a wartime air raid, gutted by one fire after another, then burned out again in 1954. Far beneath it lies the derelict central station of the Royal Mail's defunct underground railway. Some of the mail centre's machinery is twenty-five years old. They used to have twelve letter-sorting machines; now they have eleven and use the twelfth for parts. Mount Pleasant is the Royal Mail's favourite ‘before modernisation' exhibit to Gatwick's ‘after'. ‘I've been here eight years,' said Richard Attoe, the manager who showed me round with David Simpson, ‘and it's never had a lick of paint.'

All this is changing. Mount Pleasant is the chosen one: the last mail centre to remain standing in inner London after the South London operation, in Nine Elms, and the East London one, in Bromley-by-Bow, went dark in 2012. The reason they didn't get the same £32 million renovation as Mount Pleasant, Royal Mail said, is that there wasn't enough for them to do. In 2006, London posted 861 million pieces of mail. By 2014, Royal Mail predicts, that will have fallen to 335 million. Across the country a score of mail centres have been or will be shut, including Liverpool, Bolton, Hull, Oxford and Milton Keynes.

On the evening I visited Mount Pleasant, an entire floor had already been cleared, ready for new machinery, Hajime Yamashina and the Safety Mole. While the makeover proceeded, the mail didn't stop. The depot workforce was sorting a flood of census forms and handling two million trade union ballot papers without breaking sweat. Some new machinery had already arrived. One enormous contraption, like a Marcel Duchamp–Philippe Starck collaboration, did nothing but sort A4 envelopes. ‘This machine is about five years old. It replaced about 120 postmen. It's an excellent bit of kit,' Attoe said. ‘When we get the census forms through, it just bangs them out.'

Simpson gazed through a window into the guts of a machine where endless missives danced hypnotically. ‘When you look at it you get a feel of Britain as a nation,' he said. ‘There's something unifying about it.'

Besides its huge mail centre operation, Mount Pleasant has a delivery office. It is, in effect, the City of London's mailroom, delivering to all the EC postcodes. One morning I joined a postwoman, Denise Goldfinch, on her round. Postal workers call them ‘walks'. As I walked towards the green plastic gills of her sorting frame, her colleagues began to bark like dogs: a postal worker called Prince had just entered the room.

Goldfinch was a petite woman in a sky-blue Royal Mail blouse, with a henna bob and gold hoop earrings. She'd got up at ten to five and caught the 63 bus from Waterloo to start her six a.m.
shift. Her son is BA cabin crew; her husband is a driver. When I met her it was not long after nine and she was sorting her mail down into individual addresses, wrapping them in bundles with red rubber bands, ready to go in her pouch. She had three lots of mail that day. While she was delivering the first batch, a van would be dropping two more bags off at ‘safe drops' where she'd pick them up later.

One of the things you realise when you see a postwoman prepping the mail is how much time she has to spend dealing with the global public's incompetence. Goldfinch had more than a hundred undeliverable letters. A single legal firm in New Jersey had sent a dozen to a non-existent company on her walk. Goldfinch had to put a sticker on each one and tick a box explaining why it couldn't be delivered. She went to weigh her first load: it came in at 9.7 kilograms; the maximum is supposed to be 16. ‘What it is, because in the Royal Mail everything's done on seniority, because I've got twenty-five years, this is what we'd call a good walk,' she said, meaning it was relatively light. She reckoned it would take her two hours. She skipped her morning break, and we left Mount Pleasant at ten; she'd be finished by noon.

I carried Goldfinch's bag, and we stepped through the turnstile into the spring sunshine of Farringdon Road. It was like being in a promotional film designed to show how wonderful it is to be a postwoman. The leaves were coming out, the air was mild, and old ladies greeted Goldfinch by name, as if they had been looking forward to seeing her, as if they were lonely and might not see anyone else that day. We rang the doorbell at a flat to get a householder to sign for something and after a long delay he came to the door. He looked wan but pleased. ‘Sorry about the wait, I'm recovering from a stomach bug,' he said. ‘How are you?'

‘I'm well, thank you.'

‘Nice to see you.' And we moved on to the flower shop. Perhaps the sickly addressee lived alone; a third of British households
have only one member. As long as there is post, at least one human being comes to the door with something for you.

The sun doesn't always shine on postwomen. It snows. It rains. Dogs bite (it happened to Goldfinch once). There are stairs to climb – hundreds, if you work in Edinburgh or Glasgow – and hills and muddy paths. Most postmen don't get to step straight out of their delivery offices and into their walk, as Goldfinch does. And most walks last longer than two hours. Lower-level union officials and individual postmen complain that Royal Mail is fiddling the figures and mail volume is going up, not down; that the software used to calculate optimum routes for walks doesn't take reality into account; that postmen are getting ever larger loads and being bullied into doing ever longer walks. In a barbed inter-postman discussion on the bulletin board royalmailchat, postmen talk of daily loads from 120 kg (heavy) to 25 kg (light), though a postman who claims to have weighed a load of 130 kg is regarded with scepticism.
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On another thread, a part-timer asks whether other postmen think it is possible for him to walk eight and a half miles on his round in two and three-quarter hours, as he is expected to do. The consensus is that it isn't.