Towards the last post?
Next week, we may see a five-day Post Office strike in the 300 Crown Offices which are mainly in city and town high streets. It’s maximally inconvenient and will be grim if it happens. Cue huge amounts of spluttering from government spokespeople, and Conservatives referring to the old enemy – union paymasters.
But, as so often in our politics and media, we are in the world of the sideshow here. The truth is that the Post Office is now in the government’s sights for total privatisation. It has sold off Royal Mail – gifting £600 million in dividends to various foreign investors this year alone – and now it sees the Post Office, a popular, necessary manifestation of the good, providing state, so that’s got to go too.
It has got the rural post offices in mind – that network which is so necessary to business, social life and connection with the state, via pensions, benefits and trusted financial outlets. There are 6,000 rural post offices – the Government thinks we can manage with 3,000.
The excellent Christopher Hope of the Daily Telegraph reported this week that the Post Office is required by the Government to guarantee that 95 per cent of the rural population must be within three miles of a branch. But ministers have now ordered a review to help them “to understand consumers’ and businesses’ expectations for what the network should look like and how it should be operated”.
Who dreams up this garbage language – ‘understanding consumers’ expections’? In plain English, it means: “Your time is up, suckers – go online so that we don’t have to pay for state services.”
Not much spluttering from those ubiquitous Conservative spokespeople about this. Nor about the reason for the CWU strike plans. The union has called the strike in protest against Post Office plans to transfer more than 60 of its largest outlets to the private sector. Along with other cost-cutting proposals, the closures will lead to the loss of about 2,000 of its 6,600-strong workforce in crown branches, back office and cash handling.
About half the Post Office’s total workforce is also being forced to shift from a final salary pension scheme to a defined contribution scheme, which unions say will mean significant pension losses for its members.
So the truth is that the Post Office is being carved up on the high street and handed to the likes of WH Smith, and is about to halved in the countryside. A third of the skilled public servants at the Crown Offices and back offices will be thrown out of employment and the Government is smirking about the possibility of cutting the £80 million ‘subsidy’ which comes to an end in 2018.
I don’t think a strike before Christmas is a good idea (and Unite the Union which also represents Crown Office staff isn’t joining in) but I can see why Post Office staff are so angry and frightened. I am too – by this destruction of a great British institution which has been for so long the benign face of the state to which we belong and contribute.