Last post?

Don’t worry – it’s not my last post on this blog. What it is, though, is a reflection on the state that the Labour party – ably abetted, it seems, by its mates in the European Union – has left our postal service. What was once the pride of the world is now greatly reduced. The Half-Blood Welshman has an excellent post on the subject, and highlights a point that frontline politicians – from all parties – seem to have missed:

It all boils down to a brutal fact. If we want a postal service that can deliver whatever we want, wherever and whenever we want it, it will have to be funded from general taxation, because such a business will always run at a loss. If we want a truly commercial, profitable service, then we have to accept that it cannot deliver the same extent and level of service as Royal Mail. From that point of view, both Parliament and (to a lesser extent) the unions are shadow-boxing over irrelevant points of structure. At some point in the next five years, the call between these two choices will have to be made. I have to admit I am very glad that I will not have to make it.

This is simply because of the EU directive that created a semi-market in the UK postal service. Effectively, they allowed private companies to cream off the handling (but, of course, not the delivery) of the most lucrative and profitable part of the postal market. But your hard-pressed postie, working for the Royal Mail, still has to deliver it.

It is almost Lewis Carroll. In fact, Carroll wasn’t that mad.

Mandelson is supporting the Royal Mail and not the strikers. He is turning on his own people. It is time that folks realise that Labour is not for the working men and women at all; and it is time to sort out this dreadful postal mess, but not by strike-breaking or further exacerbating the conditions of the hard-working posties and their colleagues in sorting offices and elsewhere.

Otherwise, it will be the last post (not from me, but from the Royal Mail).

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