Private Island: Why Britian Now Belongs to Someone Else

by James Meek

  Another private postman, Joris Leijten, who quit Sandd a few months earlier, told me he used to sort mail on his bed. In a café among the grand villas of Bussum, near Hilversum, he handed me the flyer that Sandd put through his door after he resigned, advertising his job: a picture of four smiling white people in Sandd blue, striding down the road with light sheaves of paper, grinning. ‘Keep busy outdoors, in charge of your own time,’ it read. ‘Ideal for students, housewives and pensioners.’ He showed me a day’s work from just after Christmas: three rounds, sorting and delivering 323 pieces of mail, weighing a total of 81.4 kilograms, to 279 addresses. Sandd claimed this should take six hours; Leijten said it took eight. For this he was paid a little over twenty-seven euros – not much more than three euros an hour.

  Sandd promotes the job as a ‘bijbaan’, a bit of work on the side for somebody who wants fresh air and exercise and already has a state pension, is studying or has a salaried husband. But Leijten, thirty-two and unable to get the museum job he’s trained for, is not alone in relying on several poorly paid bijbaans for his livelihood. I asked whether Sandd had given him anything besides eight cents a letter. Normally, he said, workers had to pay for their uniforms out of their wages. But the company also hands out ‘points’ every so often, which can be redeemed against a blue Sandd jacket.

  In the Netherlands, as in Britain, the postal market has been liberalised in the name of the consumer, as Europe’s former citizens are now known: competition, it is said, will benefit everybody. But competition, as Leijten noted, only really exists for large organisations. Private citizens can’t post letters in Sandd or Selekt mailboxes. There aren’t any. Ordinary Dutch people still had to pay forty-six cents to send a PostNL letter. The Dutch government, meanwhile, had negotiated a deal with Sandd to deliver some of its mail at eleven cents a pop. ‘For ordinary people, there’s no choice, there’s only TNT,’ Leijten said. ‘The postal system is sick.’

  On the eve of my journey to Holland, David Simpson, the earnest Ulsterman who was Royal Mail’s chief spokesman, took me to one of the facilities the company is most proud of, the Gatwick mail centre in Sussex. Despite its name, it has nothing to do with the nearby airport. It’s a giant mail processing plant, built in 1999, that sucks in and shoots out every letter, packet and small parcel posted from or sent to every address in six hundred square miles of England, from the M25 down to the south coast, from Eastbourne in the east to Littlehampton at the westernmost edge of the county. They sort two and a half million items a day.

  Michael Fehilly, Gatwick’s manager, strode around in a grey pinstripe suit, brown loafers and an open-necked pink shirt. He’s second-generation Irish. ‘My dad tells me I’m a plastic Paddy, not a real one,’ he said. He grew up on a council estate in Peckham and joined the Post Office as an apprentice postman in 1987, aged seventeen. He hated the early starts and was ready to quit after a few months. Instead they made him a trainee manager. Twenty-four years later he is a company star. Under Fehilly, Gatwick has embraced the philosophy of the Japanese management consultant Hajime Yamashina, which Royal Mail is trying to propel throughout the company. Yamashina visits Gatwick all the time. He was at the mail centre on the day the earthquake and tsunami struck his homeland. Fehilly’s eyes shone as he preached the Yamashina way. It starts with safety. All over the mail centre there are cute cartoons of an animal in a white coat and glasses: the Safety Mole. ‘ “Don’t be safety blinded, be safety minded,” ’ Fehilly said. ‘When I started the programme I could guarantee twenty-eight accidents a year – a knock, a bump or a bruise. Last year we had zero accidents.’

  The vast industrial space, made of breeze blocks and galvanised steel and filled with trolleys and sorting machinery, is neat and clean, enabling Fehilly to practise his kaizen powers of vision. He stopped suddenly and pointed to a bit of floor that looked spotless to me. ‘I can see three rubber bands and a label,’ he said. ‘That’s a defect to me now. Five years ago I would just have accepted that. Now my eyes have improved, that’s a defect to me.’ Fehilly has worked with the staff to find solutions to problems they didn’t know were problems. The Gatwick workforce saved a million pounds a year just by hiring an electric truck to replace the laborious heaving of mail trolleys from one side of the plant to the other. They discovered that certain electric conveyor belts were slowing down the people who worked on them and invented a simple, unpowered device that let gravity do the work instead. They found that, for more than a century, nobody had questioned the number of pigeonholes in the frames that mail sorters use to sort letters by region. Why were there fifty-six? Because there’d always been fifty-six. It turned out that entire man-years of pain and muscle strain, not to mention wasted time, could be saved just by reducing the number of pigeonholes to fifteen and cutting openings at the back as well as the front.

  Yet even with such ingenuity and co-operation, even with the closure of post offices and mail centres and the whittling down of the company workforce from 230,000 to 165,000 in nine years, even at relative peace with the union, even earning £9 billion a year, the Royal Mail was struggling, competing for a shrinking quantity of mail with aggressive competitors, first among them Holland’s TNT.* Unlike its competitors, it was – and is – obliged to hand-deliver to every home and business in the country, from Lerwick to Penzance, six days a week. It couldn’t make more money without modernising faster, and it couldn’t modernise faster without more money. Hence the main official justification for privatisation, a familiar one – that a private Royal Mail would be able to borrow money for itself, privately, whereas a publicly-owned Royal Mail couldn’t be allowed to borrow and add to the government’s debt.

  I wondered what Fehilly thought of the Sandd system, and told him I was on my way to the Netherlands to see how their private postmen operated. Fehilly didn’t see why it couldn’t work in Britain. ‘We can prepare the mail for delivery,’ he said. ‘We can go and deliver a sack of mail to some mother’s house who’s just dropped her kids at school, she can spend two or three hours delivering mail in her area – it’s a model we’re aware of and would like to use. We’re stuck with a large workforce … [the Dutch model] is a model we’ve spoken of and would like to do in the future.’

  I sensed Simpson, standing at my shoulder, prickling nervously. ‘We’d certainly have to agree that with the unions,’ he said.

  ‘Of course, yes. But why not?’ Fehilly persisted. ‘I’d say, in the future, why not look at these models if they’re more efficient?’

  It’s not easy to understand what happened to turn the Netherlands into a test bed for a private postal service. In privatising their own royal mail the Dutch, who for some reason have an image in Britain and America as vaguely hippyish lefty liberals, went one step further than Margaret Thatcher ever did. The Dutch establishment weaves a subtle web of complicity and patronage that binds its members together over generations, discouraging discussion of the past with outsiders. Ruud Lubbers, who as prime minister from 1982 to 1994 led the free-market charge, declined my interview request. Neelie Kroes, who pushed through the privatisation of the Dutch post office under Lubbers in 1989, had the excuse that she is a European commissioner.

  One morning I went in search of the last left-winger to run the Dutch mail, Michel van Hulten, who had the post office in his portfolio until 1977 in the government of Joop den Uyl. I boarded one of the yellow double-decker trains that tick across the Dutch countryside and set out for van Hulten’s home in the town of Lelystad. At some point a change in the light made me look up from my book. The landscape had altered. To the right of the train was a flat plain dotted with rows of boxy houses. There was something raw and fresh about the land, like some stretch of the American prairie that had only just been settled by Europeans, and something strangely familiar about the low-rise, flat-roofed, cuboid form of the houses, even the way they were spaced: it looked like Milton Keynes.

  To the left, towards the sea, the view was disorientatingly different. It reminded me of a
n illustration in a book I had as a child of how the north European plain would have looked at the end of the Pleistocene era. Under a grey sky, the flatlands stretched off towards the bright horizon, dotted with isolated trees, bent over by the prevailing wind, like some Friesian veldt. The spring grass, sprouting bright green out of the cold soil, was being cropped by huge herds of deer, shaggy, long-horned kine and wild ponies. It was a primeval scene, a few minutes north-east of Amsterdam; only the mammoths were missing.

  This, as van Hulten explained to me in the kitchen of his Lelystad bungalow, was Flevoland. It’s artificial, the result of perhaps the most grandiose act of intervention in nature by a twentieth-century government: the creation of new land out of the sea in the form of two great polders, together about the size of South Yorkshire. The kitchen where we sat eating toast and cheese and drinking coffee was, when van Hulten was born in the Dutch East Indies in 1930, several metres under the salt water of the Zuiderzee. The deer, ponies and cattle I saw had been imported and left to run wild in a nature reserve, the Oostvaardersplassen. And Milton Keynes? ‘The English new towns were an inspiration for us,’ van Hulten said, and he smiled at me kindly as though I were a long-lost relative. He was one of the architects of Flevoland, and one of its early inhabitants. He and his wife were among the first four hundred settlers of this new world in 1972, as his brief political career began. The virgin lands he helped to create are a memorial to the era of government intervention, of belief that the state had the power, the right and the duty to make a better world for its citizens. The building of the dam across the Zuiderzee began as a Great Depression work programme, and the appearance of the polders above the waves coincided with the high-water mark of progressive socialist optimism in the 1960s and 1970s.

  ‘In the beginning, the state did everything,’ van Hulten said. ‘It was a state enterprise and fully paid from the state budget. When you needed money no one in the Hague was interested why: you got it.’ Marxist and New Testament ideas mingled in van Hulten and the spirit of Paris was palpable in Holland in 1968, when the non-aligned group he was one of the leaders of, the Christian Radicals, became a political party, the Political Party of Radicals or PPR. A series of accidents led to his getting a seat in parliament and in 1973 he found himself, to his surprise, the minister for transport in a left-leaning coalition government, responsible for, among other things, the Dutch post office.

  In the 1970s the Dutch, like the British, experienced high inflation, rapid industrial decline, strikes, a vague sense of national failure and a reaction against the dirigiste, technocratic governments that built new towns or summoned a Flevoland out of the sea. Locked in a fractious coalition cabinet where the prime minister’s trump card was his ability to stay awake in late-night meetings longer than any of his quarrelling ministers, van Hulten saw the growing ideological polarisation of Dutch politics, but didn’t realise that the same intellectual currents driving Thatcherite and Reaganite thinkers were at work in the Netherlands. When he took charge of the Dutch post office, it was losing money. His solution was straightforward: he doubled the price of stamps. He still sounds surprised that he was attacked for it from the opposition benches by Neelie Kroes, who accused him of hurting business. His idealism brought him up against the rightist finance minister, Wim Duisenberg, over the post office bank.

  ‘It was one of the richest banks in the Netherlands, 100 per cent owned by the Dutch people,’ van Hulten said. ‘It was my opinion that we should use the money for social purposes … That was a fight I lost. Duisenberg already favoured making the post bank independent of the post office. I did not understand this at the time as a move to privatisation.’ Van Hulten left government and parliament after the 1977 election. His successor, Kroes, set about preparing the ground for the privatisation of the Dutch post office. Not long afterwards, a curious sequence of Nazi-related scandals felled Lubbers’s Christian Democrat rivals – one of them, the ex-postal worker Wim Aantjes, forgot to tell anyone that he had joined the SS during the war in order to get out of forced labour as a postman in Nazi Germany – and Lubbers became prime minister, pushing through postal privatisation with Kroes in 1989. Seven years later the privatised company bought the Australian parcels company TNT and took its name.

  Van Hulten, now in his eighties, is still an activist, an idealist. The privatisation of the mail depressed him; the latest privatisation, of Holland’s local transport networks, made him angry: the three bus companies supposedly competing in Lelystad, he said, were all owned by the same French firm. ‘Today’s Wednesday, yeah?’ he said. ‘On Wednesday, we have at least six people coming to the door, all bringing some mail. First was the local paper. Then the other local paper. Then the postman comes. Three more will come later. I think that’s the basic defect of post office privatisation. What used to be done by one man is now done by six. They’re all underpaid, and the delivery hasn’t improved. It used to come in the morning, and now I’m still waiting.’

  When the Dutch post office was privatised in 1989, there were reasons to think Lubbers and Kroes had done the organisation a favour. For all their belief in the virtues of the free market, the Dutch were evidently guided by a patriotic sense of national interest when it came to their royal mail. Where Britain sold off the shiniest part of the old Post Office, the telecoms part, as British Telecom in 1984, leaving the mail to fend for itself, the Dutch kept the mail and phones together until 1998, making the company stronger. From 1986 to 1996, when postal services in both countries were making money, the Conservative government borrowed almost all Royal Mail’s profits – £1.25 billion – to fill the holes in Britain’s budget, while the Dutch post office kept its profits and used them to modernise and to buy TNT. In the late 1990s, when email and the Internet began to destroy paper mail and new European rules exposing the old postal services to competition loomed, the Dutch were in the stronger position. In 2000, TNT had become so powerful relative to Royal Mail that the Blair government held secret talks about merging the British postal service with, or selling it to, its Dutch rival.

  That deal fell through. But the regime put in place by New Labour in 2000 to expose Royal Mail to competition had a curious effect. Whereas other European countries, like the Netherlands and Germany, protected their old postal firms by giving them complete commercial freedom long before they had to compete with rivals – privatisation first, to prepare for liberalisation – Britain did it the other way round: liberalisation first, privatisation later. What this meant was that Britain’s rules for who could deliver what mail, and for how much – rules that were supposed to protect plucky, nimble entrepreneurs from the pampered monopolistic dinosaur that was Royal Mail – were of most benefit to the only marginally less pampered private monopolies of the Continent. By trying to prevent the small mammals of the postal world getting squashed by the Royal Mail brontosaurus, Labour and their advisers exposed Royal Mail to the raptors of TNT and Deutsche Post, aka DHL.

  I asked Martin Stanley, the former civil servant Labour put in charge of exposing Royal Mail to competition from 2000 to 2004, why Britain did it before everyone else in Europe. ‘Unilateral disarmament,’ he said. ‘If we hadn’t disarmed first, it would have taken Western Europe much longer to do it. Deutsche Post and TNT didn’t face serious competition in their home countries. They were portrayed as these great privatised companies but they were not competing in the bulk mail business, they were simply making huge profits. British policy was, if we don’t open up, nobody will.’

  Then surely, I said, letting other countries’ monopolies take market share from a British monopoly, when the British monopoly couldn’t do the same in Holland or Germany, wasn’t fair competition?

  ‘I don’t think we could have said we have a UK competitor but not a German one,’ Stanley replied. ‘What really matters is that mail is posted, collected, sorted, transported and delivered by British people: always has been, always will be. Ownership of the company is irrelevant. If we hadn’t come along and woken up Roy
al Mail in the way we did, Royal Mail would now be a horrible basket case.’

  Except that a horrible basket case is exactly what Royal Mail did become, according to Richard Hooper, whose successive reports on the organisation – the first appeared in 2008 – gave the government its case for selling the company off. ‘Without serious action,’ Hooper warned, ‘Royal Mail will not survive in its current form and a reduction in the scope and quality of the much loved universal postal service will become inevitable.’

  One day in 1979, a British postal functionary settled down to write a five-page instruction called ‘Trap Doors in Postal Buildings’. He listed five kinds of permissible trap door. A trap door in category B ‘should be strong enough to carry the weight of a man who accidentally steps on the trap door. It must carry a label on self-adhesive vinyl, black on yellow, measuring 250 by 200 mm, saying DO NOT STAND ON THIS TRAP DOOR.’ Who was this far-off bureaucrat? Did a superior send him a memo telling him that there was need for a fresh trap-door instruction? Why? Were they constructing postal buildings in 1979, or postal castles? Was the anonymous official, perhaps, the same person who wrote instruction N02F0024, ‘Vocabulary of Grey Uniform with Corresponding Outer Clothing’, or declared in instruction K07B0400, ‘Clocks’, that ‘Clocks should be provided in cloakrooms that serve more than 50 persons, but not in corridors’?