But the postal industry is heading for a much deeper crisis than the issues on the table: email has slaughtered the amount of physical post we all send, direct mail marketing budgets are haemorrhaging (last month’s PWC audit of direct mail spend made depressing reading for any direct marketing agency), and most business communications have completed their switch to email and the web. Whatever your political stance, the economic reality is that ecommerce is the one rung holding up the revenues – and jobs – in the whole sector.

It’s the bitterest of ironies that the companies who use the Royal Mail to deliver their goods are almost single-handedly responsible for preventing the Royal Mail’s profitability from going into freefall. This month they’ve all been incentivised to look for alternatives, and once they switch suppliers there will be a downwards stepchange in the Royal Mail’s revenues.

I’m neither political, nor involved in the postal industry, so only just another observer, but I’ve been writing about the effects the digital networked society has on companies for more than a decade (http://meadows-klue.blogs.com), and it’s the classic businesses (rather than the digital natives like Amazon and Ebay) who hurt most under the pressure to adapt. There are no easy answers in all this, but if we’re to save rural post offices, preserve daily deliveries, maintain an equitable pricing structure that doesn’t penalise the isolated, have a nationwide efficient network, and save the jobs of the workforce, then some alternative models need to be figured out.

Let’s just hope – for everyone’s sake – that happens.

At least they won’t strike on the weekend so I can get to her soonish!