We always welcome a Letter to the Editor to share with our readers. If you have something you’d like to share, get in touch. Ed
Dear Mr Harris-Cormack,
You may be aware of a saying among those of us who live in rural areas: “If you want to find a fool in the country, you’d better bring them with you.” It follows, therefore, that we do not take kindly to being taken for fools.
Your undated letter to “Customer” deals with what you euphemistically describe as “modernising” Royal Mail. This translates for me and many others I have spoken to as describing the politically-motivated and deliberately undervalued sale of a profitable public service to commercial interests for private profit.
As with the ever-growing catalogue of under-performing once publicly-owned enterprises, this will inevitably lead to a decline in the ability to meet the need for a public service in the interests of satisfying the greed of private shareholders.
In light of this, your three assertions under the heading “What this means for deliveries in your area” can be translated thus:
- “We will still be delivering throughout the morning, but also now for longer during the day.” Translation: (Given that our rural deliveries are already between noon and 1400hrs) “Expect your post at teatime.”
- “The time you receive your mail will depend on where you live on the new delivery route: this may be later or possibly earlier than you are used to.” Translation: See above and: “In the interests of profit, staff reductions will mean larger areas for new delivery routes, increasing the incidence of mis-delivery by hard-pressed staff unused to the district. If you are in a rural area, your mail will be even later or even delayed.”
- “Should mail volumes vary, I may need temporarily to adjust delivery arrangements and times.” Translation: ”If there is not enough mail for a delivery route to meet profit parameters, it will be delayed until there is a sufficient amount, which may be a matter of days, possibly weeks, in some rural areas. In the further interest of the pursuit of profit, ‘temporary adjustments’ may become permanent, with deliveries substituted by enforced customer collection from a centralised drop-off point to suit Royal Mail Group Ltd.”
Rather than making any comment of my own on the “modernising” of Royal Mail, I offer this from a national newspaper commentary on it yesterday:
“The government valued the (Royal Mail) business at just £3.3bn, yet the shares jumped 38 per cent on the first day of trading and this week were trading around 561p – 71 per cent higher than their original price, showing once again that the British taxpayer had been massively shortchanged by privatization.
“As for Business Secretary Vince Cable’s promise that only ‘responsible, long-term institutional investors’ would be allowed to buy Royal Mail shares, it was revealed a few days after the sale that Lansdowne Partners, one of the world’s biggest hedge funds and whose co-head of development markets strategy, Peter Davies, was the best man at Chancellor George Osborne’s wedding, had bought up a £50 million stake in the company.”
Yours sincerely, Michael J. Starke
