16 January—Upon digesting Wednesday’s disquisition on canned USPS post-Christmas gratitude, a reader in Blighty commented: “How refreshing! Our Post Office—mail—has been taken over by a Czech, and the Postal rates have gone sky high. £1.70 first class letter. £0.87 second class letter. (3 days delivery). Europe. £3.40. World incl. USA £3.40

“Usurious!”

Incredible and unbelievable, outrageous and extreme. If the sterling figures sound astronomical, at today’s exchange rate, £1.70 translates to a whopping $2.28. That compares to the 78 cents the USPS currently charges for a first-class Forever stamp. And £3.40 translates to a more whopping $4.56, compared to USPS’s mere $1.70 international First-Class Forever stamp. And it’s pretty much in line with postal rates for letters all over the world. Certainly makes the United States Postal Service seem at least a little less unreasonable.

As for usurious, the UK Post Office does in fact lend money online through a third-party shylock at interest rates some may consider usurious, but that’s a different story. In fact, the whole British postal system is a different story. First, there’s Post Office Limited, the state-owned network of about 11,500 access points. Those are the retail locations that are essentially like USPS post offices but provide more services, many, like banking, being legacies of the old GPO—General Post Office—state monopoly. The GPO also ran the telephones. And in the old days you stuck a postage stamp on just about everything, kind of like a wax seal.

Then there’s the Royal Mail that actually carries the mail for the government. It was privatized in 2013 and most recently was acquired by the Czech EP Group just last year. His Majesty’s (poor excuse for a) Government retains a so-called “golden share” of the Royal Mail; its nominal value is only one pound, but it gives HM(pefa)G’s bureaucrats full veto power, presumably to keep it from screwing the public even more than it’s already done. (Golden shares bring to mind Trump Tyrannus and Nippon Steel, but that’s not for now.)

Simply put, then, there’s Post Office Limited, where you drop off and can pick up mail, and Royal Mail that carries and delivers mail to homes. If you were wondering or even knew about it, official-sounding UK Mail isn’t part of the British postal system. It’s owned by the American-founded, now German, DHL Group and competes with Royal Mail, just as UPS, FedEx, and DHL compete with the USPS.

Not too long ago—between 1999 and 2015—the Blighty Post Office, then fully owned by the state, was positively—make that negatively—quaked by the Horizon IT scandal, named after the faulty Fujitsu accounting software, essentially a typical corner-office bureaucratic cover-up of a computer software glitch that metastasized disastrously, causing hundreds of false civil and criminal prosecutions of local postmasters; personal, family, and corporate hardship (to put it mildly); and at least 13 suicides.

No postmaster was guilty, only senior Post Office executives. Many of the innocent victims have been compensated to some extent by HM(pefa)G, but the restitution is progressing very slowly. Typical.

No surprise that none of the bureaucrats responsible for the tragic travesty have been criminally charged, although an investigation is said to be ongoing—after all this bloody time. And, of course, no executives of the Post Office or Fujitsu have been fired specifically due to their involvement with the Horizon scandal.

So what else is new?