Politicians were once advised never to do battle with the Pope or the National Union of Mineworkers. That primacy has long passed and been replaced by the National Federation of Sub-Postmasters in league with those champions of grey power, the Women’s Institute, Age Concern and the Townswomen’s Guilds.
Last week 1,000 of them marched on Westminster carrying the largest petition in British history, 4m signatures representing 23m customers. They demanded the salvation of the village post office. Abandon that vestige of the pre-Thatcher public sector, they cried, and you abandon rural Britain. The village post office, with its pension books, musty stamps, bicycle clips and red pillar boxes, is still the Home Guard of empire, testament to timeless values.
As a commercial enterprise the 6,000 rural sub-post office network is crazy. Eight hundred have fewer than 16 customers a week. They need a subsidy of £16 per transaction and make a loss of £150m overall. It costs £1 for every transfer through the PO’s “card account” bank, as opposed to a penny through a private bank. A quarter of the rural offices make no money at all and their owners are close to destitution. This is classic central government at its most inefficient. How has it survived so long? The answer lies in two potent concepts, the little old lady and the English village. They have chosen the rural post office as their last redoubt, there to fight to death or glory. One MP after another rose in the Commons last week to side with them, usually MPs who had hitherto shown no interest in country matters. Village recreation grounds may be sold for executive estates. Old people’s homes may go bankrupt. Village schools and village policemen may vanish from the face of the earth. But close a sub-post office and the sky falls.
Post offices are the last outpost of central government and therefore MPs feel they should be protected by monopoly. Yet these same MPs voted to strip them of the stamps monopoly, the benefits and pensions monopoly, the car licence monopoly and the television licence monopoly, all in favour of wider choice and availability. MPs will doubtless also agree to phase out the sub-post office’s last lifeline, the payments card account, used by the 2% of pensioners without bank accounts. MPs talk the talk but do not vote the vote.
The ending of these retail monopolies has led to the closure of some 4,000 post offices over the past eight years. The 14,400 remaining are, according to the Post Office, 10,000 too many for when the post office counters subsidy ends in 2008. With only 40% of rural offices covering their costs even now, the 6,000-strong village network must be doomed.
I am sure that Age Concern, the Women’s Institutes, Citizens Advice and other lobbyists are right in saying that post offices are “a social lifeline for many isolated people”. But why should the taxpayer subsidise a social service through uneconomic post offices, any more than it should subsidise Spar or church services or a bowls club or a coffee morning? What is the unique societal virtue in a TV licence pad and a card account withdrawal? We know about the chatting in the queue, but if there is a social problem, tackle the problem.
The campaign to save village post offices is in reality a front for rescuing a sort of Britain that has gone by the board. Once upon a time the post office was, like the railway branch line, a village’s link with the outside world. With the church, the pub, the constable and the grocer, it formed the composite village personality, idealised in the nostalgic writings of Laurie Lee, Ronald Blythe and Rowland Parker.
It was rooted in the soil, in the village as a place where everyone knew everyone because they worked day-round on the shared activity of farming. As Parker showed in The Common Stream, about the Cambridgeshire village of Foxton in 1974, this ideal was finished long before the war by the coming of the combine harvester. In half a century the farming population of Foxton shrank from 90% to just 3%, while a third was retired and a third worked elsewhere.
The village paradigm lived on for half a century on the back of the common agricultural policy. Alongside the subsidised farm was the subsidised bus and train, the subsidised library, the subsidised post office, even subsidised agricultural fuel. This is coming to an overdue end. The advent last year of single farm payments cut farm incomes and recognised the farmer as a de facto salaried state employee. It made rural communities more dependent than ever on income imported from urban and suburban areas.
While a fifth of Britons still live in what they regard as country, less than 2% of labour is even remotely related to farming. The defining village activities today are leisure and retirement. Rural Britain is dormitory Britain, second-home Britain, horse-riding Britain, shopping Britain, internet Britain.
The village is being reborn (see The Archers, passim) as a variegated economy learning to adapt to newcomers and new income streams. Some newcomers have little loyalty to the village as a whole. Others have both the time and the money to be fiercely loyal.
Rural houses are now as expensive as urban ones, often more so. To live in a village offers the same status as once attached to a prosperous suburb. Property prices in the Chilterns or the Windrush valley are akin to those in Marylebone and Belgravia. With this has come reaction. The demand to keep newcomers out of villages in Wales and the West Country might seem as bizarre (and crypto-racist) as it would in Islington or Fulham. Yet “affordable rural housing” for their offspring at the taxpayers’ expense is still demanded by villagers, as if to live in the country conferred a right of hereditary tenure.
British villages are changing probably faster than any other social entity under pressure from urban immigrants. Their institutions are changing as fast. The pub is becoming a restaurant and the garage a supermarket. If a village feels that its elderly need help, it should cooperate to supply it, not demand that the state use the proxy of a commercial enterprise that has outlived its need.
The virtues claimed for village life, those of sociability and care for others, are on the wane because the institutions that propped them up are finding it harder to sustain themselves. These are the voluntary bodies that long underpinned neighbourhoods, in towns as well as villages. They are churches, Women’s Institutes and local arts, social and sporting clubs.
Where they have withered, it is because the framework of local participation has withered with them. Neighbourliness is a joined-up concept in parlous supply in modern Britain.
I find that visitors from abroad are often astonished at Britain’s moribund parish institutions and lack of community activity, beyond the occasional village fete. It is as if the British were uniquely uncaring and socially introverted. This, not the closure of post offices, is the cause of the social isolation revealed in last week’s debate.
The current Labour government preached “communitarianism” before 1997. Afterwards it eroded local democracy, imposed crippling health and safety rules on village churches and clubs, and insisted on sprawling housing estates with “built-in isolation” for the immobile elderly. Devoid of any feeling for the countryside, ministers merely set about a ban on hunting.
Someone should spur a revival of community participation in Britain. A crash course in parish innovation is needed similar to that which swept Scandinavia in the 1970s and 1980s, enveloping communes, municipalities and mayors. It should capitalise on the wealth that is pouring into many British villages and on the time that many retired people have to spare. Most rural communities in most parts of the world look after their old people without having to call for help from a near bankrupt nationalised industry.
Nor is all lost. The admirable Leicestershire village of Sheepy Magna raised £45,000 in 2003 to convert part of its church into a one-stop community enterprise, with internet access, a baker’s shop, a Fairtrade market and, of all things, a sub-post office. It took nothing but determined local leadership. It can be done, even in England.
Simon Jenkins’s Thatcher and Sons is published this month by Penguin Simon Jenkins
