The mutterings and frowns rippled along the queue. As people stood to post their Christmas cards, it was the cost of a first-class stamp that knocked them. £1.65 was repeated with sad, slow headshakes.
Confusion and sadness turned to anger. By the time a couple in their 70s were two from the counter, they had neckties around their heads, were spray-painting revolutionary graffiti, shouting about Paris ’68 and calling for the government to be toppled. Quite the scene, if not QUITE true. But it may be that this is the final year that a lot of cards go out. This is a shame. Posting cards might feel anachronistic to some, but who doesn’t like to receive them? They are a generational connective tissue that extends back and forward, like a Hallmark whale song.
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The cost for an equivalent domestic stamp in Germany is about to hit 95 cents this week (on 1 January). In France, it’s going up in the new year to €1.29. All have mentioned changing postal habits as a reason, but the UK is the only one to really spike charges, then privatise the system. The new owner of Royal Mail, Czech billionaire Daniel Křetínský, has had to guarantee certain minimum service and to keep HQ in the UK for five years. After that, who knows.
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Given what we know about how poorly the private sector is when it comes to certain essential services, the decision to privatise is odd. Even America hasn’t privatised its postal service. As we report this week, when the water industry in England and Wales was privatised by Margaret Thatcher in 1989, it raised £7.6bn for the exchequer. The combined debt of the private water companies is now estimated to sit at £60bn. And ultimately, it’s going to be all of us who will have to meet that debt in order for services to function in future. To give the new government their due, the decision to privatise was taken by the previous lot. And Starmer is attempting to fix some failing services, rail being foremost among them, by bringing them back into public ownership.
The coming year will be a significant one for the UK. Starmer’s stuttering start has allowed a lot of Cassandra-like doom-struck hot takes from many within the commentariat. But given the scale of the task, it was hardly going to be easy. And the reality that followed Boris Johnson’s bloated boosterism shows that perhaps its best to begin with small projections and build out from there.
