Great Britain: The sick man of Europe

[Stormproof]

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I suspect we Brits secretly revel a little bit in reports, like the one from uSwitch today, that reveal our standard of living to be quite shabby.

We've always had a spartan streak. I have recently enjoyed bathing in cold streams. After running round a mountain. And that was on holiday.

And like good Edwardians we've always been a bit suspicious of Continental ways - all those long lunches and lax work practices and days off: makes you soft!

But now we haven't an empire to cling on to or the Third Reich or the Commies to see off, maybe we should relax a little.

The report highlights that high incomes in the UK are cancelled out by long working hours, poor annual leave, and rising food and fuel bills. I'd add congestion, noise pollution, poor public transport and growing income inequality to that list.

The Royal Mail saga sums up a lot of our problems in microcosm.

Another report today shows that Royal Mail bosses have shared more than £10m in bonuses for implementing cost-cutting measures.

These presumably are the cost-cutting measures that have so immeasurably improved the service we've been getting from Royal Mail the last few years?

They are, I think we can say, measures that made the postal group an operating profit of £321m in the year to 31 March. And what happened to that money?

Royal Mail chief Adam Crozier has banked £2.4m in performance bonuses since arriving at the group in 2003. This boosted his £3.6m total salary over the period, and further perks have added millions to his package.

Since 2002-03, Royal Mail has paid its executive team a total of more than £22m in salaries alone. This was increased by £ 10.7m in performance-related bonuses.

How clever these wizards are to make money from a monopoly! Only in this country do bosses receive million-pound bonuses for closing down post offices, asset-stripping and axing jobs. Once Royal Mail has been run into the ground, private companies will come in and raise prices.

And call me a Trot, but if I was a Royal Mail worker, I'd be a little peeved: workers' pay has been frozen for 12 months, with the average postal worker earning £346 a week gross.

And the recent dispute of course has followed our familiar Anglo-American model of abrasive, confrontational industrial relations - which leaves unions looking chippy, bosses looking intransigent, and the rest of the population waiting four weeks for their Amazon delivery.

And the icing on the cake? The news today that in order to stick our thumb in the crumbling dyke of public finances, we're selling off every last sugar-spoon of the family silver.

More of the UK's public infrastructure will be put into private hands, thus creating a private monopoly from a public one - ignoring decades of evidence that such an outcome is rarely preferable - so managing executives can syphon off more of the nation's wealth.

Rule Britannia!