Glitter & the Trouble Over the Post Office

MPs are fighting again over the future of the Royal Mail. There are two camps; one is advocating its sell off, the other wants it to remain in public hands. The government is split and if they wanted to sell it, they would have to push the sale through with the backing of the opposition against its own backbenchers.

Over the years, the Royal Mail has been broken down and sold off in parts and I was actually quite surprised by the proposals to sell the remainder because people are actually very sentimental about the Post Office and any moves to flog it abroad would probably not be the best political strategy to adopt. The obvious answer I thought would instead be to look at the management and then I was reminded who the management was and I started to get angry.

I got angry because I started to smell the fowl stench of Adam Crozier again. Some will remember that Crozier is the marketing man from Satchi & Satchi who somehow managed to propel himself to the head of the FA at the turn of the millennium and blighted it with controversial reforms before he was forced out. He was then hired by the Royal mail in 2003 to help it change from a lumbering money loosing monopoly to a dynamic, competitive institution that would be able to compete in a deregulated market.

His answer to this has been as far as I can see it, a load of branch closures and relocation coupled with celebrity laden adverts promoting financial services. The organisation continues to loose money and cost the tax payer. So....that means he's failed. His answer to failure is to sell it. If we sell it then it wont be our problem any more. Does he get a bonus? Oh yes!!! In fact he has been at the top of the Public Sector Rich List for the last 3 years running earning well over £1million per anum (coincidentally he has been in the Top 10 Rewards for Failure list for the last three years too - http://www.taxpayersalliance.com/files/public-sector-rich-list-2008.pdf).

In all honesty, I have nothing against paying someone a high salary or a bonus if they earn it. The reason for our financial troubles isn't "bonus culture", rather what I call "glitter culture". If something looks dull, shabby or old, stick a bit of glitter over it. It works wonders in the home and over the last fifteen years or so we have been tortured by home improvement shows on TV showing us exactly how to do it. The problem is that it doesn't transfer to the corporate world. In the corporate world, if the machine is getting old, covering it in glitter doesn't work. Neither does it work in politics and we are beginning to see that now.

The reason we are in trouble as a country is because since Tony Blair came to power in clouds and puffs of glitter, our private sector has also been infested with hollow marketing men armed with whole suitcases of glitter. Crozier is just another one of them. The sad thing is that after this row over the Royal Mail has blown over, he'll probably end up running one of the banks or even worse the FSA!