Could one imagine a more heinous crime against grandmother? Commentators and editorialists, lately, announce tremolos in the voice – or in the pen – nothing less than the “death of the stamp”. And behind that, unions quick to agitate fears, promise us nothing less than the disappearance of the postman! It should be noted that the media discontent of the last few days comes mainly from rather well-to-do, educated categories, who shout all the louder as they hope thereby to prove their knowledge of a fantasized “real country”, touched on during brief weekends. in the countryside, clinging to tradition and resistant to modernity.
This parlor misery, which was for a long time the prerogative of the left, until the right also claimed to be “popular”, only skews the debate. It is all the more regrettable that we are touching here on a discussion of general interest too often avoided in France: what is public service in the 21st century? Those who read these lines regularly know how much I deplore the absence of real, serious and informed political debate on the subject.
Volume divided by 2.5 since 2008
La Poste specifies that of the 6.5 billion letters transported in 2022, express letters only represented 275 million. A significant part, certainly, but very minor. By weight, this amounts to 1.5% of the postman’s bag… The total volume has above all been divided by 2.5 since 2008. However, to maintain the network necessary for the delivery of this increasingly residuals, it costs La Poste 120 million euros and 60,000 tonnes of CO2 equivalent. It is therefore strange to see some elected officials who claim to be green to oppose the changes proposed by the Post Office but who have no such scruples in advocating the closure of overhead lines or the elimination of diesel.
The world is changing ever faster: as a teenager and then a student, I mainly used Facebook and SMS from my first Nokia 3310 phone. Young people who today use smartphones a hundred times more powerful than my first computer have relegated Facebook to the era Jurassic and swear by TikTok and Snapchat. The postcards of my childhood have been supplanted by Face Time from the ski slopes. The period is perhaps less poetic. We haven’t necessarily gained either proximity or intelligence in exchange, but can we go back? Surely not.
National comforter
The world is changing at full speed. La Poste would not have the right to evolve? Should it, because of its status as a national comforter, remain frozen in the 20th century? What if we always pay more to transport a decreasing volume of mail? Economic nonsense, since it means that the red stamp costs us collectively more and more per unit, while fewer and fewer of us use it.
However, is the fear of the decline and, perhaps one day, the disappearance of public services unfounded? Of course not! I lived 17 years in the south of Ardèche. I know how remote the prefectures are, the roads often poorly maintained, the courts overloaded, the mayors overwhelmed.
Can tomorrow’s public services forever look like those of the 60s and 70s? La Poste explains that the money saved by the replacement of the red stamp (and not its abolition, as one can read here and there under the pen of misinformed people, because there are other stamps left) will be used to develop services such as home delivery of meals and medication. Future activities, unless we want to continue to crowd our seniors into nursing homes. We would deprive ourselves of these public utility services to preserve a symbol that does not even speak to my generation, and even less to the following ones?
Build rather than fear
By dint of clinging to the past, we too often forget to prepare for the future. Nostalgia is comforting, but it will never allow us to build the world of tomorrow. If we – citizens and politicians – knew how to look further than the end of our noses, we would not have these medical deserts to the heart of the largest metropolises. We would not have hundreds of thousands of vacant jobs in strategic sectors. We wouldn’t have this anxiety about pensions. We would not live under the threat of power cuts. So columnists, analysts, commentators: let’s start by checking the information we relay. The debate on the future of the Post Office and public services will grow out of it.