Isn't visiting the Post Office a joy these days? Whilst one is standing in the always-lengthy queue, you are assailed by at least one TV screen showing irritating clips of the chubby barman from Early Doors, and a range of other slebs - Westlife, Joan Collins, and soon Bill Oddie! - encouraging us all to use the 'People's Post Office' (we're already doing it! We're in the queue!!); on looking away ones eyes settle on boxes full of cheap dvds, tacky cards and derivative calendars.
Down here in the south, a number of post offices have recently been shut, in yet a further rationalisation in the drive to make the Post Office profitable. Each closure means that the remaining outlets have greater queues, and yet despite a seeming surfeit of customers, they still can't make a profit.
This is because it can't; the range of services it offers - car tax, postage, passports etc - surely place the Post Office into 'public service' category. Indeed, this is what it was when Labour came to power; the Tories had mooted privatisation, but hadn't got anywhere. Labour attacked it with glee. Rather than make the case for taxation to support the institution - and including within this analysis that a post office in, say, a remote village is an important social contact for many isolated people - the Government constantly pushed it to make itself more profitable, and meanwhile hived off the profitable elements to competition; that phrase, once used of Thatcher, of 'knowing the price of everything, but the value of nothing' is, appallingly, one that sums up this government.
(photo Dominics pics on Flickr)
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