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Post Offices – open or shut?
“By all of capitalism’s standards of logic the Post Office must be
under threat of disappearing” |
Postman Pat, delighting children by zooming around Greendale with
his observant cat Jess, became a TV success by cashing in on the
romance which lingered around the workers who, in all weathers and at
all places, delivered the mail. How would Pat survive now, with
Greendales’s post brought by a tee-shirted trolley-pusher jigging
along to loud calypso music from his radio, who is liable to stuff as
much junk advertising material through the letter box as proper mail?
It was not always like this; well within living memory postmen (they
were always male) wore thick, dark uniforms topped by a hard helmet
resembling the pickelhauber of the German Army at the start of the
1914/18 war (the peaked caps, just as obligatory, came later). No
trolleys then; postmen had to carry the mail in a large, rough sack
slung across their shoulder held by coarse string. And they came
several times a day; before the age of the telephone it was common for
people to tell their family or friends that they would visit them on
the following day by writing them a post card – relying on the
post to get the message there on time. No wonder the posties had so
exhaustive a knowledge of their round – who lived where and with
whom, how well, or how sick, they were, who had a birthday when. It was
this sense of human contact that brought many postmen to be addicted to
the job. Like Postman Pat.
Closure
Along with your friendly neighbourhood postman, as part of the same
deal, is – or in some cases was - the local post office –
also friendly, in fact at times so much so that it resembled a kind of
minor, casual branch of the Samaritans. Because it was here that local
people came, not just to buy their stamps and postal orders or draw
their pension but to unload their anxieties or celebrate their
successes. They were more small shops than post offices, selling
newspapers, food and the like. It is a general assumption that they
existed only in rural areas, in small sleepy villages but in fact they
survive, supplying their locality, in many a town and city. One example
was given by Keith Hill, the MP for Streatham, in a House of Commons
adjournment debate on 13 March 2008. He described the Abbeville Road
post office in Clapham, a part of London where roses do not grow
sweetly around the doors of quaint cottages and no ploughman homeward
plods his weary way. This post office was under threat of closure (it
has now closed); in its defence Hill praised the services on offer
there, making it “a focal point in the community” and
“a lifeline of human contact for its many elderly
customers”; a petition with over 2000 signatures testifies to
this.
Loss
In that same debate Pat McFadden, the Minister for Employment Returns,
after the customary emollients about what a brilliantly eloquent
speaker and industrious MP Hill is, gently reminded him of the real
facts of capitalism’s life, the sense of which is that it is all
very well talking about how valued a service may be but what counts is
whether it makes a profit or a loss. And by those standards the Post
Office network does not show up well; according to McFadden last year
it lost £174m, with the cost of some operations high enough to
make any accountant with an eye to a balance sheet choke. The postal
system as we know it, including pre-payment through adhesive stamps
(the famous Penny Black), arose from the demands of 19th century
industry and commerce. In the same way, many of the Post Office’s
present problems are due to it falling behind changes in technology,
which have led, for example, to eight out of 10 pensions being paid
electronically into a bank instead of being drawn over the Post office
counter, after a chat with the staff about their family. Car tax can
now be paid online, which is quicker and easier than queuing up with
people wanting a book of stamps. While people may get some relief,
enjoyment even, in being able to drop into their local branch but that
is not how commodity society operates. By all of capitalism’s
standards of logic the Post Office must be under threat of disappearing
as an unvarying, ubiquitous feature of social life.
Reprieve
Chosen to make this happen was Adam Crozier, a man who, even before he
got to work on shredding the Post Office network, might have been
described as controversial. For example after closing some 4600
offices, cutting the work force by 45,000, in 2007 he collected a 26
per cent increase in his basic pay; with his bonus and pension his
total came to £1.250.000. However perhaps he will not be so busy
in future. In November the government, anxious to placate back benchers
being lobbied by irate Post Office customers and to persuade the
electorate that they have the recession under control, decided that the
Post Office would keep the contract to run the Card Account, which had
seemed about to be passed to a private company. This surprising move is
expected to prevent some 3000 closures. When it came to explaining so
abrupt and emphatic a change of policy the government were able to call
on Minister of Work and Pensions James Purnell, who has shown himself
well capable of shamelessly defending any policy – or change of
it. Taking time off from harassing the sick and unemployed he told MPs
that the Post Office “…is seen as safe, secure and
reliable as a provider of financial services. I believe that now cannot
be the time for the government to do anything that would put that
network at risk” and on BBC Radio that the Post Office is
“…a social service which people look forward to visiting.
It is often at the heart of local communities”. We should not be
surprised at this hi-jacking of the case put by the government’s
opponents for it is just another example of the blatant smoke-screening
of the reality of capitalism’s chaotic nature. There is no need
to watch this space because we can all guess what will happen
next…
IVAN
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