Sound the last post. A fat lot Westminster cares

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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/commen ... 882709.ece

Cut the Royal Mail lifeline and you snap yet another of the frayed threads holding Britain together
Richard Morrison

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If I were Margate’s tourism officer I wouldn’t know whether to laugh or cry. The good news is that one of the resort’s old seaside shelters has been Grade II listed — an acknowledgement of its unlikely role in the creation of one of the 20th century’s greatest poems. The bad news is that the poem partly written in that wind-lashed shelter was The Waste Land, possibly the bleakest expression of life’s futility ever penned in the English language.

That probably won’t do much for the town’s B&B trade. Nevertheless, it’s quite apt, isn’t it? There can be few sights more desolate than a British seaside resort in winter — and T. S. Eliot was in Margate in November. For a man recovering from a nervous breakdown and trying to distil into poetry the collapse of Western civilisation in the wake of the First World War, it must have been the last straw.

It’s strange how often the most gripping literature, music and painting is created in grim circumstances. In London recently there was a concert of the astonishing music written and performed by prisoners in Terezín, a Nazi concentration camp. Many were sent to their deaths shortly afterwards. John Bunyan wrote his great allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress during the 12 years he spent in prison in Bedford; and Oscar Wilde was incarcerated in Reading jail when he penned his astonishing cry of despair, De Profundis.

In a lighter vein, Paul Simon allegedly composed one of his most celebrated songs, Homeward Bound, while shivering on the platform of Widnes railway station — an unlikely conjunction of inspiration and circumstance now noted for posterity on a wall plaque. “If you’ve ever been to Widnes,” Simon said, “you’ll know why I was so desperate to be homeward bound.”

One might have thought that beautiful surroundings or happiness would trigger the greatest acts of creativity. But the evidence of these examples, and a host of similar stories, suggests the opposite: that geniuses are often at their most inspired when embroiled in the gritty realities of life on the edges of society.

I wish the same were true of politicians! I wish that, like Eliot in Margate, or Orwell in Wigan, or Solzhenitsyn in the gulags, or Dickens in the workhouse, our political classes would occasionally be forced to leave the stultifyingly insular, reflecting-glass world of well-heeled London and experience life at the bleak margins — the margins about which they theorise and orate so glibly. I wish that, if only for a month, they would relinquish their expense accounts and second homes and discover what it’s like to live on a yob-terrorised estate with nothing but a state pension to keep body and soul together. I wish they would send their kids to schools like the one close to where I live, where drug dealers lurk outside the playground, gangs rule by coercion inside and one class was taught maths by six supply teachers in a single term.

Perhaps then we would have a very different set of priorities coming out of Westminster. Case in point? Well, let’s take the current Royal Mail dispute.

Suppose a politician — let’s say Lord Mandelson, who is apparently “beyond anger” at the attitude of the postal workers — did what I did a few years ago: got up at 4.15am on a perishing winter’s morning, cycled to a Royal Mail depot in Inner London and went with a postie on his six-mile round delivering mail for 300 quid a week. What would he find?

The answer is something that probably wouldn’t occur to slick politicians and the callow 25-year-old researchers who feed them statistics. As the postman and I walked round the estates, doors to many flats were flung open. It was clear that their occupants had been waiting for him since breakfast. Equally astonishing, the postman greeted them by first name, and vice versa. “Some of my older customers don’t see many people,” he explained to me. “And if a different postman is put on this round, they get really upset.”

What that dawn footslog taught me is that some traditional customs are beyond price or economic “logic”. One of them is making the lonely, vulnerable, old and housebound feel that somebody still cares for them. That such a task is left to the postman is a sad indictment of modern Britain’s sense of neighbourliness. But now that the milkman and the bobby on the beat have been largely swept away by “efficiency drives”, it is.

None of this is likely to bother Lord Mandelson, sitting in his grandiose office concocting his “modernisations” and “rationalisations” and privatisations. To him and the political and business classes running Britain, it’s all about profit. And having mail hand-delivered to 27 million addresses in every corner of Britain strikes them as hopelessly antediluvian. Good grief, it also keeps lots of ordinary people in that old-fashioned thing called a proper job! Can’t have that. Besides, who cares about snail mail? Doesn’t “everyone” use e-mail now, and internet banking to pay their bills, and private couriers to deliver urgent packages?

Well, maybe in Westminster and the City they do. But for millions living in much less affluent circumstances the Royal Mail is a lifeline. Cut that, and you snap yet another of those frayed threads holding Britain together.

You don’t have to be an Orwell or a Dickens to feel deep unease about the double standards now operating at the top of the country. If big banks behave so stupidly that they land themselves with colossal debts they can’t handle, we taxpayers must bail them out — because, apparently, “society can’t function” without banks. And, of course, bankers can’t function without vast bonuses. But it’s apparently out of the question for a genuinely vital service such as the Royal Mail to be supported by extra subsidy. After all, the main beneficiaries would be a few million people at the bottom of the pile. Who cares about them?

Gosh, it’s lucky that Lord Mandelson comes from such a strong socialist family, isn’t it? Imagine what he would be like if he was a Tory. I started with poetry, so I’ll end with it. In the same year that Eliot wrote The Waste Land in Margate, Yeats published his equally pessimistic view of the 20th-century world, The Second Coming. It contains the chilling lines: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”

In the 90 years since that was penned we have just about succeeded (though sometimes by the merest hair’s breadth) in stopping things from falling apart. But I can’t remember a time when the political and business classes seemed so oblivious to what’s going on outside their cosy little cocoon. No wonder that, for the millions living on the margins, the notion of voting for “change” in a general election is a joke.

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brian mckee wrote:
it may or may not bring lord mandelson back from beyond anger were he to read "the deserted villiage" by oliver goldsmith. his LORDSHIP should pay particular attention to lines 51 to 56 inclusive.
October 21, 2009 4:13 PM BST on community.timesonline.co.uk

ray dash wrote:
It seems to me that one reason for this is that many of the managers have university degrees and then they go directly into management with virtually no experience except for the academic claptrap they learned in university. they then spend lots of time attending meetings righting reports sitting on commitees and collecting statisyics [often inaccurate]. Ithink that it should be compulsory for them to spend time when they first enter management doing the jobs they are managing for example if you want to be in royal mail management you should work as a postman or mail sorter for a year or so first you cannot manage people effectively unless you understand them.
October 21, 2009 2:14 PM BST on community.timesonline.co.uk
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simon dent wrote:
Cound not agree more with your article
October 21, 2009 10:53 AM BST on community.timesonline.co.uk
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