The post office strike may have been settled, but the post office is still in mortal danger. An infuriating notice has appeared on the letter box outside my house, and presumably on boxes up and down the land: "From 28th Oct 2007 we will no longer collect from letter boxes on Sundays or Bank Holidays."
What madness leads the Royal Mail management to suppose that offering a worse service than the Victorians is the way to modernise their business? If the post office is to prosper, it has to be universally admired for its excellence. Post men and women should feel proud of working for an expanding and ever faster service, not depressed because a defeatist, Beeching style of management - cut costs and sod the public - has captured their organisation.
Too often, the friends of the post office, including the Tories, defend it as a service which is needed by the old, the sick and the poor: which indeed it is. But unless it is also valued by the young, the healthy and the rich, it will cease to be a universal service, and will wither into a patchy safety net for those who can do no better.
We may not write many letters to each other any more, but in these days of internet shopping, the demand for some forms of home delivery has never been greater. There can be huge pleasure is having a package, ordered only a few hours before, delivered to one's door before one leaves home in the morning.
But the pleasure is blighted if the delivery takes place long after one has gone to work, and one has to go to the inconvenience of visiting some sad, East-German-style sorting office to collect the parcel later in the week.
Businesses which are privatised go through a primitive phase, when they think that salvation lies in getting rid of most of the workforce, before they realise that salvation actually lies in providing a wonderful service, which means employing more people.
The shocking thing is that this is a Torygraph Blog
