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Lord Mandelson has let it be known he is "beyond anger" (one imagines his condition with a thrill) about the striking postal workers.
Royal Mail's managing director says their attitude "beggars belief".
The chief executive, Adam Crozier, says industrial action is an "appalling and unjustified attack on customers". Huff, puff.
Would it be the stupidest thing in the world to wonder whether - rather than hoping to commit mass suicide by destroying the company that employs them, or making war on customers for the fun of it - the thousands of postal workers going out on strike have a legitimate grievance?
Is it worth considering that, in the hopes of salvaging its broken business model, the management of the Royal Mail are demanding that its least-well-paid workers do more work for the same money, and that these workers are entitled to object?
There's no doubt the company is up the spout. The Royal Mail last year made an operating profit of £321million.
But more than a million quid of that went into Adam Crozier's pocket, and the company still has a hole in its pension fund expected to rise to £8 billion next year.
Most of the profit came from delivering junk mail.
According to an interesting article by an actual postman in a recent issue of the London Review of Books, postmen are paid 1.67p per item of junk mail they deliver - a figure that has not changed in 10 years.
They are not entitled to claim overtime if their burden of junk mail pushes their shift over length and they are not entitled to refuse to deliver it.
The Royal Mail's management claims that the volume of mail has gone down by 10 per cent. Our postie, on the other hand, attributes this figure to management arbitrarily changing the basis on which they estimate the volume of mail.
They used to assume each box in which mail arrives at the post office contained 208 letters. Now they have decided each box contains 150 letters. (A manual count organised by the union put the actual figure at 267. And our postie has a sore back.)
Sure, many people do now use email. But they still send Christmas cards. And the Post Office had 30 per cent more workers in the days before eBay, LoveFilm and Amazon.
There's every possibility, here, of mutually assured destruction. I think it's time the Royal Mail's management, whose responsibility it is that the company's up the spout in the first place, spent less time trying to turn the general public against its postmen and more time trying to come to a decent accommodation.
And perhaps tantrum-prone Lord Mandelson could be reeled back from "beyond anger" into a zone where he'll be useful to somebody.
Viz, alive and kicking
This winter Viz comic celebrates its 30th anniversary, and up and down the country, men of about my age will be celebrating with the cry of: "Viz? Is that still going, then?"
It is still going, and if you stopped reading it, I can't urge you too strongly to start again. In addition to newspaper satire every bit as sharp as Private Eye's, Viz's regular characters are Chaucer's General Prologue for 21st-century Britain.
Its genius is that, in addition to an unrivalled collection of jokes about farts and poos, it has real poignancy. The great figures of strip cartoons - from Charlie Brown's having the football pulled away to Krazy Kat being beaned by a brick - always seem to be caught in a repeating moment. So it is with those in Viz.
Biffa Bacon begins each strip hoping for his parents to be nice to him and ends it with Mutha's boot in his teeth. Suicidal Syd always sets out to commit suicide, then fails, then dies by accident just as he finds a reason for living. There are human truths here.
No, Viz is one of the glories of our age. Long may it flourish.
Another one rubs the lamp
Forget Samuel Beckett. Pantomime is surely the most desolating spectacle the theatre has to offer: a greasepainted reminder of the vanity of human wishes and the yawning mouth of the grave.
All that mirthless jocularity, all those formulaic shout-outs, all those half-remembered faces from the TV of your childhood looking harrowed and defeated, like the patient in the bed nearest the door. It is too terrible.
Now it has claimed Pamela Anderson. Once, bonnie and beaming, Pammie was the most famous woman on the face of the Earth. This Christmas she's doing a two-week run as the Genie in Aladdin in Wimbledon.
Aladdin in Wimbledon. Like the protagonist in Browning's poem A Toccata of Galuppi's, I feel chilly and grown old
• What is the Prime Minister's favourite biscuit? He refuses to say, apparently. In an online chat with contributors to the parenting website Mumsnet, he was repeatedly asked whether he was a ginger snap or a rich tea kind of guy, and repeatedly dodged the question.
No doubt he regarded it as trivial. Well. If the forums you choose for public engagement are Mumsnet and GMTV's sofa, rather than the Today programme and Newsnight, these are the sorts of questions you must expect to answer. You cannot have your biscuit and eat it.
Reader views (10)
Sam Leith - re your comments about the quality of questions on mumsnet, you clearly haven't bothered to read the Gordon Brown webchat, have you?
- Elle, Brighton, UK
Having done a bit of letter-boxing myself, for voluntary organisations, I can't believe that the issue here can be about productivity of 'posties'. There must be some other issue, probably concerning mechanisation of sorting offices.
Nevertheless, there are aspects of postie's work which need to be looked at. There are so many ways in which their task could be eased and their work made more productive.
1. Standardisation of letter-boxes and elimination of the ground-level variety
2. Any property whose front-door is more than (say) 10 or 15 metres from the road should be required to have a letter-box at the front gate - as in Australia.
The financial benefit from measures such as this would be far greater than any conceivable gains that may have been made from such things as tinkering with the postal rates for big envelopes etc.
This question of the location of letter boxes is really quite crucial to the economics of the postal service. We have inherited a system based on the seigneurial pattern of the Victorian era. In the days of Graham Hill (founder of the Royal Mail, have I got his name right ?) most of the letters were handwritten and came from local squires and lords of the manor, whose importance was judged by the length of their drive. 150 years later the economics of mail delivery have changed drastically yet we still retain essentially the same system. Major economies can be made by adopting the Australian system.
- Richard Shaw, Pinner, UK
it's time to see if the fat cats at the top can take a skimm off there milk ! I back the posty they do all the humping after all.
- Barrybadback, england
Well I can't say I am shocked to read this article. I work for BA and we have inherited a few ex Royal Mail senior managers who've come to do a similar job with cabin crew......Glad to see a REAL journalist who has bothered invesgating a bit more than just reading the typical response provided by Royal Mail's PR department.
This type of management smacks of arrogance and unaccountability and always expects their lowest paid workers to pay for their incompetence.
- Laura, London
I am the wife of a very hard working postman, whom everyday comes home more and more demoralized from the conditions within the postal service. We have a young family and a mortgage and I can assure you my husband would not be striking if it was not totally necessary. Adam Crozier and the other big wigs at Royal Mail seem to have lost the common touch and have absolutely no idea how their new proposals effect postmen and women and their family's on a day to day basis. We are basically trying to survive on the pittance postman are paid and why shouldn't they fight for better pay and conditions, unfortunately we don't have the luxury of a million in our back pockets at the end of every financial yeah, maybe Mr Crozier should do a delivery himself, he may then have a better understanding of what are posties are expected to cope with. In decades gone by I believe a place of employment, such as Royal Mail is at the moment, would be on par with a work house.
- Lucy, undisclosed
Oh thank you so much Sam. At long last a reasoned article concerning our plight. It is management that are running down the service that we care about. We are expected to do more and more while the so called "bosses" swan around not knowing what they are doing half the time and then receiving huge bonuses, between £2000 and £9000, for the efforts we make and the changes we have to endure. As for modernisation it is the managers who have their heads firmly buried in the past. 1.2 billion from the government for modernisation 600 million spent and we don't have a single piece of new equipment in our mail centre. Actually i lied i think the managers have some new chairs and a huge overtime budget for themselves !
Thanks again.
- Kevin, Plymouth
Re: Post Strike.
Dear Sam Leith,
As a postal worker myself, I'd just like to say...THANK YOU...In the few paragraphs you have used, it has been summed up nicely.
- Simon, York, United Kingdom
Good article which does tell it from the post person side, did you know in Royal Mail submission to the Hooper report they claimed they had 229,000 employees in 2002. By the same measure,this had fallen to 178,430 in 2009. This is a loss of over 50,000 and constitutes a 22% decline.
In its 2002 annual report and accounts Royal Mail reported it was delivering 81m letters a day. In its 2009 report and accounts it said it was delivering 75m letters a day. This is a decline of 7.4%
In 7 years staffing levels have fallen 22% while the number of items Royal Mail repots it delivers every day has fallen 7.4%.
Royal Mail say the postmen and women/CWU are not up for change, I disagree the management are getting big bonuses on the hard work posties do, we dont want to strike, but what else can you do if the management don't what to talk
- John, Sutton,Surrey
If This is really true and i have no reason to doubt it is,
Then Royal Mail Management need to be sorted out.This is a Public Service which we all own and i for one would like to see it run as such not run into the ground so that someone else can come in from the private sector and charge me more for a far worse service.And as for Adam Crozier what makes him think he is entitled to a million pound Bonus,from what i have read since coming to Royal Mail he has stopped second deliveries, closed Post Offices,laid off workers,made my mail later,charged me more for sending letters and parcels,charged me more if the card i was sending is the wrong size and the other week even charged me a £1 handling fee for a letter that was 4p short of postage.No wonder the workers are going out on strike, if they are treated half as bad as Royal Mail treat their customers then Good Luck to them, at least someone is trying to do something about it.
- Jean Hugard, London
Re: Post Strike
At last an article that actually looks at it from a Post worker view. I don’t know if anyone else feels the media as been hyping the management view or even making it look like militant posties wanting to rule management. In a climate of change with all our finances stretched I know no-one wants to truly strike, but when management are reaping rewards and expect workers to continue to bend backwards….of course they will snap!
Just I hope the olive branch ACAS is used
- Jackie, London
