Private Island: Why Britian Now Belongs to Someone Else

by James Meek

  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.† 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.

  ‘If a postman says to me, “Don’t tell me about falling mail volumes, I’m carrying more than ever,” a lot of the time he’ll be correct,’ Simpson said. ‘But the round is designed to take three and a half hours, with the last letter delivered at the end of the round, not the way it would have been five or ten years ago, an hour after the round started. I think most postmen are working harder and being paid the same … They’ve been used to working 80 per cent of their time, but now they’re working 100 per cent.’ Working 100 per cent, as those who have tried it know, involves shooting for 90 per cent and ending up with 110. The more precisely Royal Mail management tries to make the mailbag fit the time and distance allotted, the more likely it is that some postmen will be pressured into carrying too much too far. Times are tougher for Britain’s postmen. But in the opinion of Royal Mail’s competitors, not tough enough.

  Pre-privatisation, a typical Royal Mail postman outside London earned about £375 before tax – just shy of £20,000 a year – for a forty-hour week, with diminishing prospects for overtime. ‘That’s a lot of money in current terms,’ said Guy Buswell, the chief executive of UK Mail, Royal Mail’s only big British-based competitor. ‘My drivers who deliver parcels have to struggle to get £300 in their pay packets before tax and they work a lot longer hours than postmen do.’ Denise Goldfinch was not only better paid than the private postmen of Sandd and Selekt in the Netherlands: she got five weeks a year paid holiday for long service. She got a uniform and service footwear provided free. In the savage ice and snow of 2010–11, she was given spikes for her shoes. When she retires, it will be with a decent pension.

  But it is the Dutch model that competition is pushing the Royal Mail towards. The real battle for postal workers and their sympathisers is not so much to save the jobs that are doomed to fade away (‘60,000 people since 2002 is nothing!’ Buswell snorted when I mentioned how far Royal Mail had already slimmed down), as to prevent the degradation of the jobs that remain: to prevent the job of postman from becoming something like a child’s paper round. ‘In real terms, now, “postman” should be a part-time job,’ Buswell said. ‘If you look at the cost of sorting by hand it’s about 2p a letter; by machine, it’s 0.1p a letter. Unfortunately that’s the way it’s going to go. The actual job the postman does in the near future is just delivering. They will deliver for four or five hours and that’s done.’

  I got a pretty clear line when I phoned Muck, but I had to call my contacts on the island several times while lambs and grandchildren were dealt with. Muck only gets mail four times a week, and I wondered if they minded. ‘It seems very reasonable,’ said Lawrence MacEwen, whose family owns the island. ‘I would even be quite happy if we had less. About three times a week is probably plenty.’

  According to law, the Royal Mail must empty each of Britain’s 115,000 postboxes and deliver any letter to any of Britain’s 28 million addresses, six days a week, at the same, affordable price, wherever the letter is posted and wherever it’s going. The rule’s the same for parcels, except with them it’s only five days a week. This is the universal service obligation, the USO – ‘part of our economic and social glue’, as Richard Hooper put it in the reports that framed the debate over Royal Mail privatisation.

  There have always been a few exceptions. Muck, a Scottish island two and a half miles long to the south of Skye, is one. There are twelve households on Muck and they get mail when and if the ferry arrives from Mallaig. ‘Obviously we are very expensive to the Royal Mail to deliver to,’ MacEwen said. Bad weather can cut the ferries down to one a week in winter. There have also been times when the MacEwens put a first-class letter on the early ferry and it reached London the next morning. But Muck now has a satellite dish for broadband Internet. You can even catch a mobile signal in some parts of the island. ‘Nowadays email’s so important for communication that the post is getting less and less important,’ MacEwen said. ‘I’m afraid the Royal Mail’s in a losing battle.’

  If the battle is about keeping the USO – and that is the way Hooper put it – it is underway. At the other end of the British archipelago from Muck, the postal service on Jersey, where Anthony Trollope carried out the first trials of pillar boxes in 1852, announced in 2011 that it was abandoning Saturday deliveries in an attempt to staunch the flow of red on its balance sheet. Five days a week is the current Europe-wide minimum for the USO, according to the most recent postal directive from Brussels. But the then TNT lobbied hard to get that minimum reduced. In 2010 Pieter Kunz, then head of TNT’s European mail operations, described the USO as ‘a kind of Jurassic Park, and we should get rid of it.’ It is easy to imagine, a few years from now, the right-wing British media blaming Eurocrats for cutting the number of weekly deliveries – ‘BRUSSELS SOUNDS LAST POST FOR DAILY MAIL’ – and the private Royal Mail, with quiet relief, following the Dutch lead. ‘If TNT has its way, five days would be reduced to three,’ said John Baldwin, the CWU’s head of international affairs. ‘TNT is the bogeyman of the postal industry but they are not alone. Royal Mail, frankly, isn’t going to argue if it’s going to be released from the five-day obligation.’

  Richard Hooper’s first report recommending part-privatisation of the Royal Mail was produced for Labour in 2008; the second, endorsing a sale or flotation, for the Con-Dem coalition in 2010. Both said modernisation and privatisation were essential to stop Royal Mail going bust and to save the USO. Hooper One was unequivocal: ‘Now is not the time to reduce the universal service. Reducing the number of deliveries each week … would be in no one’s best interests.’ Hooper Two was less sure. There was no case for cutting the service, it said, until the Royal Mail was fully modernised. But then, cutting it ‘might be justified’. In both reports, Hooper expended much ink and anguish over the highly technical rules that force Royal Mail to deliver the bulk mail its competitors sort at a certain price: a price, Royal Mail says, that obliges it to deliver at a loss.

  Hooper is right in that Royal Mail is in a fight for survival with new media, the world of words not written on paper, weightless electronic words. As with music and newspapers, so with letters. It is in a fight with competitors who get guaranteed access to its reservoir of postmen as if they were a water or gas supply. But it is also the subject of a third kind of competition, between t
wo utterly different sets of customers with incompatible needs. A few hundred giant firms and organisations that want to send bursts of millions of letters and catalogues every few days are competing for the same set of postal workers with millions of people who want to send a few Christmas cards and once in a while something that needs a signature. In this competition the power lies with the few, whose priority is cheapness, rather than the many, whose priority is regularity and universality; cheapness wins, and it is the postal workers who suffer.

  There’s a strange blip between the two Hooper reports. Hooper One is full of laudatory references to the old Dutch and German postal monopolies, TNT and Deutsche Post DHL, which privatised, then modernised, then became free-market champions. There’s a chart showing Royal Mail bottom of the class in Europe in terms of profit in 2007, with TNT and Deutsche Post leading the pack, raking in the euros. Two years later, Hooper Two was strangely quiet about the German and Dutch mail stars. No wonder: the equivalent chart for 2009 shows that TNT and Deutsche Post averaged profit margins of only 3.25 per cent, less than Royal Mail.

  The bitter postal rumble between the Netherlands and Germany in the late noughties may have had nothing to do with these figures, but it looked like the symptom of something rotten. When I say bitter, I mean bitter. TNT’s Almast Diedrich was courteous in the face of my impertinent questions about the company’s activities in Britain, but when I asked about one particular German attempt to block TNT’s expansion east, his mouth twisted into something almost like a snarl. ‘What Deutsche Post did was very clever,’ he said between his teeth, ‘and typically German.’ What the Germans did was not so different from what the Dutch did: they tried to protect their decently paid former state postmen from low-wage competition in their home country, while setting up networks of low-wage private postmen to undermine the former state post in the country next door. At one point, Diedrich said, TNT managers called the offices of the German postal union, noted their principled stance in defence of well-paid Deutsche Post mailmen in Germany, and asked when they were going to take a similar stand in defence of appallingly paid Deutsche Post mailmen in Holland.