["Mr Christopher Murphy, Tory MP for Welwyn and…]
Socialist Press1981 1981-02-18Read it in the scan (PDF), scan page 3 →
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"Mr Christopher Murphy, Tory MP for Welwyn and Hatfield, who has tabled a motion protesting at the plan, said it was the main topic of conversation at Westminster. "There is a tremendous uproar.""
Not unemployment; not inflation; not nuclear war; not the Council for Social: Democracy.. And not even Joanna Harris, the soon to be expoultry inspector.
The debate that is iocking the Commons is over the plan to paint telephone boxes yellow.
This scheme is not part of the programme for socialist revolution-'more red, not less' is our slogan-but has nevertheless touched a raw nerve deep inside the bourgeois consciousness.
The Daily Mail is running a Keep Our Telephones Red Campaign, and every loudmouth with newsprint to spare has added his/her twopence (or rather fivepence) in articles which link the colour of the phone boxes to decimalisation, the British Empire, the golden days of servile workers and their inability to find a taxi on their way home.
The irony is that the 'yellow peril, as it was dubbed by several jaundiced sub-editors, is not the product of a whim, nor is it a disastrous overordering of paint for window boxes ('I said one gallon, you fool, not one million gallons") but outward symbol of the split in the telephone and postal services.
The Telecommunications division is not only a source of an enormous profit for itself but creates a market in which multinational giants can fish at their leisure.
Even in a recession as sharp as this one, telecommunications is still making fortunes in an expanding market.
The Postal side of the business is also a source of profit for advanced manufacturers of sorting equipment, etc., but not on the same scale.
It also inhibits entrepreneurs who feel they could open businesses delivering business and special mail if the government would break the Post Office monopoly.
That in turn implies the destruction of the 'inefficient' (in financial terms) daily delivery of mail to people's homes.
But divisions are easy to create on paper and less easy