Perry de Havilland comments on the impending postal strike.
In this era of highly efficient competing international courier companies, why bother with state letter carriers at all? Do not ‘privatise’ the Royal Mail as was planned earlier, instead make the workers (very generously) redundant… all of them… then sell off the assets to the highest bidder, end the anachronistic monopoly on letter delivery and get the state out of that business completely: simply wind up the Royal Mail.
This is another situation where my pragmatism is at odds with others of a libertarian bent. It sounds all fine and dandy – let the private sector pick up the pieces of an over bloated and inefficient public service. I’m not so sure, though, that it is inefficient. Sure, it suffers some of the hidebound institutionalised attitudes and resistance to change I encountered in British Rail back in the early nineties. But, the Royal Mail delivers to everyone no matter where they are, no matter how remote, no matter the actual cost of delivery. Even if it is just one small letter. Will a private business accept that burden? If so, Perry’s point stands. But if not, then there is still a place for a national carrier.
This is much the same as those rural bus services that are uneconomic, so require government subsidy to run. Any courier picking up the pieces of Royal Mail would likely as not be knocking on the Treasury’s door asking for a handout. I think, on balance, I would rather have the Royal Mail. Warts and all.
Its a fair point, but it is not inconceivable that a Universal Service Obligation (USO) could be built in to the market. This was done when BT was privatised and C&W (Mercury) was allowed to enter the market. BT’s local line business is still highly regulated and they still have an obligation to deliver basic telecoms (Plain Old Telecom Service(POTS)) to anyone who demand it.
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Quite so. The most logical way of doing this is to sell the Royal Mail as a going concern in much the way that BT was.
I have no ideological opposition to the provision of universal services by a private company. I do have a problem with the loss of that universal service – which, I suspect, would be the outcome of Perry’s solution.
The rationale that this is a rapidly diminishing market fails to address those who do not have and do not want Internet access.
I see that the head of the postal workers’ union, who’s name I can’t remember and can’t be bothered to check, has declared that he isn’t going to make the same mistakes as Arthur Scargill did in leading the miners to irrevocable defeat.
Maybe someone should explain to him that he already has. He has thoroughly pissed off the public before the strike has even begun.
Indeed. If there was a lesson to be learned from Scargill, it is that with strikes there are no winners. I learned that much from the signaller strike of 1994. What we settled for was pretty much what was on the table before the strike started. So, Railtrack suffered, we suffered and for what? Never again.
Maybe the striking mentality isn’t so much about winning as having a go at the “enemy”. Usually the enemy are the public, not the bosses.