Sir – The destruction of the Royal Mail was referred to three times in the Western Daily Press on Tuesday.
Your leading article rightly points to the disastrous affect on post offices when the Government brings in its ‘smart’ways of paying the state pension.
On the letters page, J Knight, of Chippenham, points out the wrecking activities of Sir David Naish and, in your editorial, you refer to the Press’s campaign for rural post offices in 1999.Why did no-one mention the cause of the demise of our splendid postal service?
I’ve written several letters to various newspapers during the past three years explaining that the Royal Mail was dismantled under European Union Article 97/67EC of December 1997, which brought in the EU’s universal postal service.
None of my letters were published, but I’m trying again now.
Any sane and honest person who wished to blend a hotchpotch of businesses into one would take the best as the standard and bring the rest up to match it. That, as we now know to our cost, is not the way of the EU.
The British Government’s White Paper 1999 on the implementation of the Postal Services Directive 1997 was designed to fit our service into the chancy, hand-to-mouth ways of the Continent.
Directive 97/67EU laid down that only letters under 350g could come under a monopoly.With its usual eagerness to screw its people down to the last turn, our Government decreed, in 1999, that only letters up to 150g could be handled by the Royal Mail.All other packets and post would go to licensed companies.
Consignia, a name that could only have been conceived by bureaucrats, suddenly emerged and chaos entered where there had been order and efficiency.
Now a German firm, Deutsche Post, has been licensed to deliver mail in Britain. It will handle only business mail – the most profitable part of the postal service.
It denies that its employees will wear German postal uniforms, but what will happen when employees of French, Italian, Greek, Spanish, Polish, Bulgarian, Cypriot or Turkish companies come to our doors? Will the employers want their people to wear distinctive uniforms?
These licensed companies will not take on the extra work of paying benefits and pensions. That is why pensioners must stand out in the streets in all weathers, struggling to remember pin numbers.
People living in remote places have already been warned that their postal deliveries will change. The attempt to introduce the £14 weekly charge is an indication of the kind of thing we can expect once new firms have got a grip.
Your editorial ended with: “all it needed was for someone to listen”.
You’re mistaken. I remember a French politician saying, not long after we joined the EEC, the “Anglo Saxons must be brought down”.
Every British government since the 1960s has worked hard to secure that. The only successful business now is gambling with other people’s money.Unless we leave the EU we are a doomed nation.
N Cooper Malmesbury Wiltshire