God, It’s two days since I posted, and I feel so guilty. It’s cause I only want to give you top quality me-based musings, not just rattle off whatever vague political ideas just happen to wander into my transom*
I’ve been mostly finding the post offices debate unbearably depressing. Here we have the spectacle of MPs desperately refusing to say what they really think: That local post offices are only surviving because of a massive subsidy from government and that this is long term an untenable solution.
The Tories position on this is especially laughable – here is the party of the “post bureaucratic age”, the party of the free market, the party of low taxation, calling for the long term continuance of a massive, market distorting subsidy to support the most complex and increasingly less popular method of disbursing state services to the populace. Or rather, here is said party, not calling for the extension of that subsidy but trying desperately to give the impression of so doing. Pathetic.
There is an easy way to keep the Post office network at current strength. You could stop sending money to peoples bank accounts direct. You could stop people paying for the TV licences online or over the phone. You could go back to the days when all passport applications and drivers license applications were made through post offices. You could even ban anyone other than post offices selling stamps. That would guarantees a surge of business for Post office counters. It would also be really, really dumb.
Because people don’t have to visit post offices, they’re doing so less often. They’re also tending to go to bigger post offices, not smaller ones. That means that in order to stay open local post offices are being subsidised to the tune of £500,000 a day. To maintain the network, that subsidy will only have to increase every year.
Think how many health visitors that could buy you, Mr Cameron! You wouldn’t need to slash the Sure Start programme you think is so wonderful. What a relief!
Now, of course, the counter argument (see what I did there? that’s why I get the big bucks) is that post offices have an important social function. They do, but they are businesses too. At what point does one argue that it is not the state’s job to decide which businesses are socially worthy of subsidy?
Why are politicians so quiet on this topic? Because of what I call the general>specific slip. It’s easy to advocate rationalisations and cuts in subsidies in general, but it’s much more difficult to do in the particular. Even I, who am standing for no elections, would rather not have some eager opponent produce a leaflet twisting what I’m saying into some “SEN BACKS POST OFFICE CLOSURES” leaflet. Of course MPs will oppose closures locally where they see a case for keeping an individual post office open, but really the issue is that it shouldn’t be a central government decision at all. The Post Office should be working commercially so if they want to close post offices, someone else need to find the money to make it worth their while to keep them open. Why should it be a minister in Whitehall?
What the post office debate really comes down to is priorities. The cost of maintaining the current network of post offices will be roughly £200 million a year. No-one calling for an end to post office closures is promising the post office that money indefinitely**. Without it, much of what is being said by the opposition is cant.
So here’s my suggestion. The best people to decide whether local post offices are socially worthwhile are the people in each community., not national government.
The government should make it clear that the post office subsidy is ending, but if local councils want to pay for the maintenance of local post offices out of their own money they will not be rate capped for doing so. That way, my local Wandsworth council can show just how passionate they are about keeping post offices open.
So, if you really want want a local network of post offices it will cost you on your council tax bill, or even better, parish council bill. Simple. If your council tax bill goes up to fund your local village post office, you will be delighted to pay ensure it is open. If you couldn’t care less, you can vote for lower taxes.
Now if only we could use the same mechanism for farm subsidies…
*Double credit for those who got the Spinal Tap reference.
**The Tories aren’t promising it at all. The Lib Dems are proposing part privatising Royal Mail, and using the receipts to preserve the Post office network. This sounds superficially attractive, but it’s just pouring money at a problem and hoping it will go away. After ten years the money would be gone and you’d have to answer the same question.
6 Comments
March 20, 2008 at 4:48 pm
There were two quite good letters recently in the guardian on this topic and only one of them was from me http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/mar/06/post.communities
Labour politicians seem to have become wee timorous beasties of late – far too terrified of upsetting anyone who might possibly be a swing voter.
For all the bold talk at conference about challenging the Tories, for example when they’re in Nimby mode or trying to preserve services that few people use and/or which cannot be afforded, there seems to be depressingly little genuine fight coming from our side’s elected representatives at present…
March 20, 2008 at 7:40 pm
Reminds me of the “Beeching”Axe ( Yes I am old enough to remember that, and steam).
Every body thought it was a good thing to keep railways/post offices open. Nobody used them. Everybody said somebody else should subsidise them.
So if the good voters of say Sheffield Park, or Bridgenorth want to form a Post Office Preservation Society, and dress up in 1970s uniform to run the local post office as unpaid labour, well they have my blessing.
Interestingly here in South Wales our local Nationalist Nuttcases are writing increasingly hysterical letters to the papers on the subject. Sent by E-Mail, not Royal Mail.
March 20, 2008 at 10:26 pm
Firstly your characterisation of what a Conservative is, is wrong from the start but I `ll explain that another day Your idea of paying your own way in villages would make some sense if the rural areas this England hating administration so despises were not already subsidising Labour’s client regions in the inner cities and Scotland though the rigged tax system . How about them start paying for themselves eh …what about the NE paying for itself for the first time in about fifty years , an area where more money is earned out of the Public purse than real money, a staggering achievement ? Why don’t local people there decide whether they want to keep their state sinecures out of their own taxes . It would be a valuable lesson for La la land to see how long they could actually hang from sky hooks .
As for £200 mio a year. Let me put this in context for you . Labour , knowing full well that its arrogant contempt for th e tax payers has been rumbled ( get those Polls), is nonetheless pushing on with a £75 million budgeted advertising campaign to tell people that if they eat less and get some exercise they might lose weight .Cooo who’d have thunk it. I kid you not it is about to be on a TV near you. You could not make it up and I have not
Then there’s the £2.5 billion on regional development offices which has achieved a nice round number of positive results 0 they do have countless offices all over the word however….what say we just have one big one …. Then they can do nothing all in one place. Just think about that £2.5 billion..!!!( N Baker dragged that out of them )
Priorities ?! Balls .Just utter balls. It is just another part of the stealthy ethnic cleansing of the independent South whose main strut to is to carpet bomb us with 3,000,000 houses 1,000,00of which will be inhabited by immigrants yet to arrive according to government figures quoted by Nicholas Soames ( and not disputed) They want to kill of independent rural life because it is at war with Labour and they well know they will never again set foot in the South and especially the rural South
The really depressing thing is the evidence from Labour MPs , that they think voters are lower than sheep by actually turning up to protest against their own polices . Its not the first time either is it .
Resquiat in pace New Labour
Hopi I read your blog with interest and you seem a nice chap but it must be starting to occur to you that this New Labour dream has gone irredeemably bad and its time to start thinking about the election after the next. Endlessly clobbering ordinary families has not worked and is not right , redistribution has not worked and as ever the pressure to spend money we do not have has become irresistible . The labour Party is in danger of disappearing certainly in England where , in fact it has . This I think stems from precisely this contempt for the electorate who are not as stupid as you would like the to be . In ten years you have raised taxes without winning the argument that it is legitimate .You have dragged us into the EU while losing the argument about its worth , you have forced multiculturalism on us and lost that argument and the whole misguided vision of a centralised state has quite demonstrable failed again and again. You are now unable to do what many on your side must know is right ..I know the feeling . It is all because you have acted by covertly not ‘covertly’. In other words its all the lies My own view is that the Labour Party will not be elected again unless they either
1 Cheat by rigging the Constitutions and risk the collapse of all government
2 Learn to say Tax cut and earn the right to be believed
Has it occurred to you that by s leaping up and down with Pom Poms no matter how implausibly you are doing your own Party more harm than good .I mean this kindly but how about a change of name and a start on making the changes . the next election is probably one to lose anyway …
March 20, 2008 at 10:27 pm
* covertly not ‘convertly’.
March 22, 2008 at 11:45 am
There used to be a post office literally down the road from me. It was essentially a small, family-run business and was incredibly useful for local residents, especially the elderly who may have found it difficult to walk into town to one of the larger post offices.
Unfortunately it was closed several years ago due to falling revenue; this was sad, but more because of the lost community asset and the owners – known to all and sundry (we’re a right rural place!) – moving away, than any “oh, why can’t things stay the same forever” inclination I may have had.
Soon afterwards, though, free bus travel for the over-65s was introduced, thereby negating in one fell swoop the concerns I had about elderly neighbours, and, I’m sure, saving a hell of a lot of public money which I’m sure Labour has made far better use of than a small, only locally used service.
Local, as in “just down the road” provision is a good thing, but we shouldn’t fetishize it as the be-all, end-all of public services.
Bit of local colour for you all. (“This is a local post office, for local people, there’s nothing for you here…”)
March 2, 2009 at 1:52 pm
[...] Disclosure: I’ve got history here too. I once wrote a long post on Post offices during which I condemned Lib Dem plans to part privatise the post office and using the proceeds to [...]