From: lexin	Date: July 1st, 2009 10:26 am (UTC)		(Link to babble)

In an ideal world, the body providing those services would be called 'the government'. Some things should not be run to make a profit, but by people who take a pride in their work and want to see their world run well.

	From: aunty_marion	Date: July 1st, 2009 10:54 am (UTC)		(Link to babble)

Hear, hear.

	From: hobbitblue	Date: July 1st, 2009 11:14 am (UTC)		(Link to babble)

Why would anyone want a post office... I mean, they're not useful. That seems to be the thinking behind what happened in Liverpool city centre, where the main post office is now inside WH Smith in the new Liverpool One shopping centre, tucked away on the upper floor, reached by stairs. The pensioners aren't appreciating this extra chance for them to improve their general health and well-being by getting more exercise and learning to get out of their wheelchairs and cast their zimmer frames aside in order to fetch the money they need to live on, its most odd..

*sigh*

	From: tattercoats	Date: July 1st, 2009 11:23 am (UTC)		(Link to babble)

Seconded (thirded, fourthed and so on...)

Local MPs and councillors ought to be on top of this - and local communities *have* overturned such closures in the past... have you a Co-op there? That's who's hosting our post office.

I do empathise.

	From: tigerbright	Date: July 1st, 2009 12:07 pm (UTC)		(Link to babble)

Amen!

(And here, too - not the post office, but lots of other services seem to get cast by the wayside. Like, oh, public schooling that actually educates children.)

Edited at 2009-07-01 12:09 pm (UTC)

	From: lyorn	Date: July 1st, 2009 03:34 pm (UTC)		(Link to babble)

Yes. Why educate when you can test? Some kids will always have aquired the knowledge necessary to pass the test (if not, blame it on the school), usually by having parents teach them, or pay for private lessons. So the illusion that the system works gets perpetuated. Plus, testing gives you numbers, and numbers are patient and can be made to say everything you want.

Those kids with parents too poor to buy them private lessons cannot afford to go to uni anyway.

	From: zellieh	Date: July 1st, 2009 12:14 pm (UTC)		(Link to babble)

[Here via lexin's link]

Oh yes, yes, yes.

And while we're at it, can we please stop hospitals and schools and local councils sub-contracting out services? Because all that does is add another company wanting another profit margin, with another layer of management wanting high pay and bonuses, and the only way they can afford all that and still offer a competitive price for the contract is to underpay the actual workers and skimp on the services they provide. Because, you know, 'unskilled labour' (like cleaning hospitals to a high enough standard) usually requires quite a lot of skill and training when you get down to it, and you don't get expertise and dedication for minimum wage.

What we need in this country is a Labour government.

Blair and Brown, curse you for your sudden yet inevitable betrayal!

	From: smallship1	Date: July 1st, 2009 12:34 pm (UTC)		(Link to babble)

What we need in this country is a Labour government.

Yes, exactly.

She may have retired, her mind may have gone (and I wouldn't wish that on anyone, even her), but Margaret Thatcher has shaped every government we've had since 1979 and she's still doing it. I honestly don't know how change for the better can ever come about, or who will have the guts to do it.

	From: tigerbright	Date: July 1st, 2009 04:15 pm (UTC)		(Link to babble)

And over here, Reagan has shaped everything - Clinton (both B and H) and Obama are both pretty darn conservative.

	From: shezan	Date: July 5th, 2009 11:40 pm (UTC)		(Link to babble)

The woman resigned in 1990, for Tebbit's sake! Time to hold more people responsible.

	From: lexin	Date: July 1st, 2009 12:35 pm (UTC)		(Link to babble)

Word. Particularly about Blair and Brown.

	From: meritmaat	Date: July 1st, 2009 06:53 pm (UTC)		(Link to babble)

Amen.

	From: shezan	Date: July 5th, 2009 11:39 pm (UTC)		(Link to babble)

Here via lexin too.

What we need in this country is a Labour government.

That's what you nominally have.

See, I live in a country (France) with a conservative government, which nevertheless believes in having normal post offices (not, good god, a counter in a supermarket) everywhere, AND trains, AND roads, AND a decent health service, AND daily rubbish collections. We've privatised electricity and gas, but I'm not going to change providers because I happen to like EDF and GDF. Water utilities I'm not so happy with, but they do get hell from the government if they try to get away from a proper service.

What we did over the years was invest in infrastructure. Labour (or Tory) governments since 1945 did not do it. Thatcher inherited a country whose infrastructure was falling to pieces. (You could see the rolling stock in laybys from the first Eurostars in 1992: it was like travelling back in time.) I don't want to start the predictable discussion about what she did or did not do; but the responsibility goes much further back than her - as well as further forward. How long were the Blair people in power? How difficult was it to invest in things rather than bloody consultants? Was it not Shriti Vadera who dreamt up PPPs, that accounting sleight of hand providing NO overseeing provisions worth toffee?

	From: hurdle1gal	Date: July 1st, 2009 01:20 pm (UTC)		(Link to babble)

If you don't have a post office, then doesn't the town you live in technically not exist? (ponders for a bit on that thought)

	From: keristor	Date: July 1st, 2009 03:09 pm (UTC)		(Link to babble)

Aylesbury, county town of Buckinghamshire, hasn't existed officially for years. We don't get weather (the weather maps for the regions go round us), we don't have good roads (single carriageway only until you get around 3-5 miles out), the only thing we do have is the railway which only runs to Marylebone (or occasionally Paddington).

Our 'main' post office was closed and the 'replacement' is at the back of WHS. So it probably isn't going to close, but is impossible to get to with the crowds of other shoppers in front.

As far as the post is concerned, though, you do still exist because the receiving of letters and collection from post boxes is done from the local sorting office (which may not be in your town) not the high street type post office. Even Middlesex still exists as far as post is concerned, even though it disappeared as a county years ago.

	From: hurdle1gal	Date: July 1st, 2009 03:16 pm (UTC)		(Link to babble)

My sixth grade math teacher and I once had an argument in class about what town I lived in, mainly due to which post-office I used. While I clearly lived in the town of Richmond, Richmond did not have a town post-office, so the post office I used for home was in the next town over. Sure, I lived a half-mile away from the town border, but it did not mean that I couldn't write "Richmond" instead of the post office town name on my envelopes. I lived in Richmond, and I shared the same zip-code as the town next door.

	From: keristor	Date: July 2nd, 2009 07:51 am (UTC)		(Link to babble)

In the UK the postal system has for a long time been divided into two areas -- collection, sorting and delivery in one and counter services (stamps, registering mail, and a load of not exactly related activities like car taxes and paying benefits) in the other. The organisation of the sorting and delivery has generally been a wider area thing and often one sorting office will cover several towns.

It's the "high street" customer-facing side which is being cut down, not the sorting side.

I don't know quite how they specify the "post town" in the UK these days. It used to be where the sorting office was, and if you were in a town served by a sorting office in a different town you would put "your town name" NEAR "post town name". It's supposedly irrelevant now since the full postcode has a granularity of individual streets or better (some roads have more than one and a number of organisations have their own postcode), you should be able to just specify house number and postcode (indeed, many organisations and some web forms just ask for postcode and house number and can look it up and complete the address). The rest of the address is on letters for verification and validation in case the postcode is misread or obscured, I usually play safe and put the full address on things I send.

	From: lyorn	Date: July 1st, 2009 01:28 pm (UTC)		(Link to babble)

(Here via lexin)

So much word.

The expectation that will not die seems to be that in the private sector you will get something for nothing.

My pet peeve is trash removal -- city outsourced it, and as the money the city was willing to pay did not pay for doing it themselves, as a non-profit, it pays for even less now that profits are also taken out of the already insufficient pool of money.

Should you ask them what the hell they were thinking, they go on about the private sector being more efficient, which on further investigation boils down to "pays less". And none of the city officials seems to have the vaguest clue that the workers not paid a living wage are tax payers, or receivers of public assistance should their wages become too low.

The other way to save money is to make people jump through a row of hoops to get the service. I bet they want you to throw your trash in the river, because then it's not their problem. The whole privatisation ideology is FUBAR.

	From: pbristow	Date: July 1st, 2009 03:24 pm (UTC)		(Link to babble)

Yes! Yes! YES!!!

(Next line censored on the grounds that I don't smoke anyway... =;o} )

Oh, and ditto for the sub-contracting concept in general. My theory is that someone must be making money by bottling all the hot air that's expended on the interminable arguments over which company's responsibility it is to fix things that fall in the gaps... =:o\

	From: meritmaat	Date: July 1st, 2009 06:58 pm (UTC)		(Link to babble)

I always wonder why privatisation of public services should be cheaper than having the community running it. The community does not want to make a profit because it doesn`t need to, these services are what taxes are paid for. A private enterprise has to make profit, so in the end, by a simple calculation, even if a private enterprise could run a service on less costs (by e.g. underpaying their workers) than the margin of money saved is money earned by the enterprise. They won`t let go of profit by the goodness of their hearts.

From: vachequirit	Date: July 8th, 2009 01:39 pm (UTC)		(Link to babble)

There is (or was) a good reason why private services may be more efficient. I'll give an example. When I started working for BT (actually it was still the Post Office back then) the engineering staff came in at 8.30am. They then sat around smoking and drinking coffee until 10am at which point the foreman rang up and got the work for the day. They knocked off at 5pm. Oh and they had a 30 min tea break at 10.30 and another one at 3pm. By the time I left BT in 1997 they were still coming in at 8.30am but they got straight down to work and the tea breaks were down to 15 mins. That is a 25% improvement in efficiency straight off.

Don't get me wrong. I believe strongly that certain things are national infrastructure and are best served by a central body (let's call it the Government, for the sake of argument) and should be provided as a service to us, the people who pay taxes and live here. But things had got pretty bad in the 70s. The above is only an example of the industry I worked in. I don't doubt that other nationalised industries were similar.

	From: dickgloucester	Date: July 1st, 2009 01:48 pm (UTC)		(Link to babble)

Well said!

	From: smtfhw	Date: July 1st, 2009 03:46 pm (UTC)		(Link to babble)

Ain't that the truth!

The irony is that here in Hull (where I am at the moment) the post office closed and is now contained within WH Smith, while Towcester (with a population of around 10,000) still has a thriving post office (even though it is managed by a moron).

	From: melodyclark	Date: July 1st, 2009 03:51 pm (UTC)		(Link to babble)

Pardon the Yank for stumbling in here but we've been dealing with this like a Category 23 hurricane since Ronald Reagan started destroying our country.

The services that work in this country without wreaking havoc on the customers: water, municipal services, natural gas, and a few others.

Services that have turned into a nightmare for distinct periods of time for millions of people: electricity, telephone, mass transit, and many others.

Guess which ones have been largely privatized.

I'm not a Marxist, I do think private enterprise has a strong role to play but if we don't have clear government rules, regulations and oversight of those things that serve people, we're giving up a stable system for something out of the Lord of the Flies. Of course that makes it much easier for groups of rich people to pilfer the system.

Central oversight also makes things much cheaper. Just ask the no-bid contractors how much a wrench costs.


Edited at 2009-07-01 03:52 pm (UTC)

	From: keristor	Date: July 2nd, 2009 08:10 am (UTC)		(Link to babble)

The things which need to be public are generally the ones in which competition is not possible or feasible. If I want to buy my water from a Scottish company are they going to run a special pipe from a Scottish spring to my house 500 miles away? No, all they do is the local company still supplies the water to me and they do some financial shuffling about who I pay. If I need to get to London there is only one line and one company which can take me there, there is no competition.

The UK problems are not just that all sorts of things have been privatised which should have been left public, they are also because (until this latest government[1]) every time the government changed some of them went from private to public and back again for ideological reasons, the railways probably the worst hit. They started off private, were nationalised, then reprivatised, then renationalised, then reprivatised, and now the government is taking one of them back public (I may have missed a few changes). And each time it /changed/ it got worse.

Actually, in the UK central oversight doesn't make things cheaper because the money comes from an invisible "public purse". It isn't the government's money, they often aren't users of the services much, and so projects are underspecified and usually way over budget and late. Defence is traditionally a good example of this, getting a defence contract meant that you could sit back and take the money and rarely have to show anything for it apart from reports. Getting an IT contract from the UK government is much the same, many of them run way over budget and several have eventually been terminated (still with no working results) years after they were supposed to be complete -- and the government still turns round and gives then future contracts.

But you are right about "no bid" contracts. The same with getting a car repaired, something which costs 100 pounds to fix for an individual somehow costs the insurers a thousand...

[1] The current (since 1999) government is supposedly Labour (was originally called "New Labour", this should have been a red flag) and therefore left-wing (in favour of public ownership, trade unions, etc.). In fact they have privatised lots of things the Tories (right) didn't dare touch. For all the things which Margaret Thatcher's government (Tory) did they never dared to touch the NHS, or waste collection, or education, or the post office, in the way this supposedly 'Labour' government have.

	From: smallship1	Date: July 2nd, 2009 09:50 am (UTC)		(Link to babble)

What needs to be public is the things in which individual choice is unnecessary or irrelevant. What we eat, what we wear, these are things that (given a reasonably prosperous society, and bearing in mind that our expectations have been absurdly over-inflated in recent decades) we should be able to choose for ourselves. That there is water in the tap, that there is a road between this town and the next, who needs choice about that? It just needs to be the best it can be.

I think the "what we need is a Labour government" comment was along the lines of Gandhi's famous remark about western civilisation. The government that came in in 1997 was Labour in name, but in fact it had been subverted by a sort of Toryism-lite. For a while one could excuse it by saying, as some have said about Obama's administration, that they had to go slow for the sake of national cohesion, that the electorate was so conditioned by Thatcherism that they couldn't have got in on any kind of socialist platform...but when Blair voted himself a forty-one-per-cent pay rise I knew we'd been betrayed.

It should have been a red flag, but they don't fly any more, sadly. I used to think socialism, like anarchism, was useful mainly as a corrective to the excesses of conservatism, but I've moved quite a way to the left in the past twelve years.

	From: melodyclark	Date: July 2nd, 2009 03:27 pm (UTC)		(Link to babble)

In the US, central oversight would require an open, highly visible public purse. The government is the functionary involved. The public services are answerable to it. I think that's where a representative government comes in handy.

Much of the time, I think the same group of jerks is in charge and they just divvy up the responsibilities in the way that makes the public complain the least. Blair could get away with what Thatcher could not. Just so, Clinton could do what Bush 1 couldn't. Bush 2, of course, was such a destructive force, the whole game has been reset. And it's hard to tell where Brown or Obama is right now.

	From: lydia_petze	Date: July 1st, 2009 10:48 pm (UTC)		(Link to babble)
	here via Lexin:

Hear fucking hear.

I work for one of the state railways in Australia, and until recently there was all this bullshit talk about "profitability" and "running it like a business". It's not a business, it's a public fucking service and it frankly doesn't matter whether or not it's "viable" to continue services out into the country - the services are needed and we pay our taxes to maintain them. Public transport is like public schooling and public health, it fucking needs to be there and if I read one more article about how "unprofitable" it is, I may need to insert it in someone.

Apologies for all the f-bombs, but this is a very hot topic with me, as a non-driver and public transport user, and also someone who sees a lot of this crap from the inside.