Partnership across Post Office counters

Successive governments have yearned to be free of the burden of running the Royal Mail and its subsidiary, the Post Office network. Their instinct has always been to flog 'em off, but that has proved difficult, not least because Royal Mail has a whopping pension deficit. Now the coalition government is working hard on a new option: privatising Royal Mail, at huge cost to the public in the form of subsidies, and handing over the Post Office system to the people who work for it. The latter scheme is by far the more imaginative. Senior Post Office managers are said to be studying the John Lewis Partnership as a model for the new enterprise. John Lewis, which runs the eponymous string of department stores and the supermarket chain Waitrose, is by far the best-known mutual company in the UK. All its shares are owned by its employees, who receive an annual bonus based on profits. Similarly, although details have yet to be worked out, the Post Office will issue shares to all its workers, and will pay a dividend from any profit. The post services bill is expected to have its first reading in parliament by the end of this month, which indicates that it is a top priority for the coalition government. It is also something of a milestone in British economic history, for when Royal Mail and the Post Office go, there will be virtually no state-owned industry left. To borrow former prime minister Harold Macmillan's famously caustic observation about the 1980s wave of privatisations, we will have pawned the last of the family silver. Barging through cuts The looming round of government spending cuts will inevitably make a deep impact on our transport infrastructure. Road, rail and airport projects will be delayed, scaled back or simply binned. But there is another mode of transport that could be even more drastically savaged: the inland waterways. The UK has 5,000km of navigable canals and rivers. The canals were, not so long ago, teetering on the brink of dereliction. But in recent years there has been a massive surge of renewed interest in the waterways, mostly by leisure users. Hundreds of kilometres have been dredged and restored, mostly by volunteers. The government subsidises the canals and rivers to the tune of £90m ($1.42m), or roughly speaking a dozen bankers' bonuses. That figure is expected to be slashed by 25%, with potentially calamitous results. The Inland Waterway Advisory Council has just published a two-year study, which bleakly forecasts that canals and towpaths will close, rivers could become unnavigable and tunnels could collapse, without continued government subsidy. The only possible reprieve could be the realisation that the waterways are used or visited by 23 million people a year. That's an awful lot of voters. A mistake of genius Jonathan Franzen's new book, Freedom, has been hailed as a masterpiece, a triumph, and even as the novel of the century (though with 90 years to go that could be a tad premature). It took the US author nine years to complete, with much painstaking revision and polishing. And now thousands of copies of the British edition are to be pulped. The reason is that an editor at Harper Collins, Franzen's publisher, pressed the wrong button and brought up, not the final transcript of the novel, but an earlier draft containing a couple of hundred spelling and grammatical mistakes, as well as small but significant changes in the depiction of two leading characters. Harper Collins is offering to replace offending versions. It might, however, please collectors more to have a copy of a novel, by one of the world's greatest fiction writers, containing so many mistakes. West gets connected Cornwall is just about as far as you can go from central England, without falling off the edge. The Scilly Isles are even further away. But these distant (by UK standards) places are soon to become one of the five best internet-connected places in the world, according to BT and the local county council. They have revealed a £132m plan for a radical upgrade of online facilities, which they say will create 4,000 jobs, safeguard another 2,000, and improve the lives of business and private internet users in the region. Some of the claims for the new network are a touch hyperbolic. The Conservative leader of the council, Alec Robertson, said that super-fast broadband had the potential "to transform the local economy over the next 20 years". Give and rate Giving to charity involves intensely subjective choices. Some prefer to give to charities working in their local community; others are attracted by schemes to aid the poor of the world. Yet others want to help organisations that deal with homelessness, or stray pets. It would be folly to attempt to rationalise all the charitable choices into a straitjacketed list of who is doing the most good, where. Yet that is the idea being put forward by a leading adviser to Britain's biggest philanthropists. Martin Brookes, chief of the thinktank New Philanthropy Capital (NPC), has said that charities should be ranked according to their benefit to society, to discourage ill-informed giving. The NPC has previously pointed out that the public has given more to a Devon donkey sanctuary than to the most prominent charities dealing with violence to women. Far right old mess At a time when the nation is quaking about the imminent pain of austerity, it is good to report some unequivocally good political news: the British National party is on the brink of disintegration. One of its most senior figures, Richard Barnbrook, has been expelled after apparently trying to mount a putsch against the BNP leader, Nick Griffin. Unrest has been seething inside the tiny neofascist group since Griffin's bombastic claims that it would make a breakthrough in May's parliamentary and council elections were kicked into touch by voters. The delightful prospect of a permanent split in the party has been enhanced by its dire financial plight – it is said to be £500,000 in the red – and by the formation of an internal "reform" group that is openly planning to form a new movement. Lovely stuff. Don't mind 'me time' It has long been a given that Britons work long hours. In fact, the average number of working hours has fallen in the last 15 years. But new research indicates that when parenting and other life-juggling tasks are taken into account, the amount of time people have to themselves is falling. A survey by the One Poll organisation concludes that we each have 8.5 fewer hours a week of "me time". The biggest time-guzzler was work, with more than 50% of people working five days a week. Of those, half brought their work home with them. More time was spent on families, relationships, household tasks and financial planning. On a daily basis, women were able to spend an average of 50 minutes on themselves. Men did better, with 75 minutes to themselves. But not all men. Goodness, is that the time? Must get on to another treadmill.