Friday, January 26, 2007

On letterboxes

I know I'm not alone in finding many a letter box ridiculously hard to push a leaflet through. Indeed it's one of the most common points of understanding people in all parties have.

So I present the latest petition on the Downing Street website:

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to improve letter boxes.

Delivering to the public is an important part of political engagement. We call for legislation to make it easier for voters to be engaged by requiring all letter boxes to be:

*Located at a clear height
*Easy to post through
*Designed to allow leaflets to be posted without destroying them
*Designed to protect people's hands when posting
*Dog proof

In addition we call for doors to have the number clearly displayed and doorbells to be easy to find (with defunct doorbell buttons removed).
I urge anyone who has ever leafletted or canvassed to sign this petition.

9 comments:

Louise said...

And the removal of all furry inserts! These cause massive problems to hapless leafleters

Anonymous said...

You want yet more laws, criminal offences and regulation?!

Tim Roll-Pickering said...

Sometimes a new law is needed. I want to sweep a lot of others away, but this is something that the free market has failed to deliver! Faced with the choice of rigid ideology and being able to leaflet houses better I will choose the latter option.

dizzy said...

this is a joke right?

Anonymous said...

Yes, definitely remove furry inserts.
And what about those external postboxes that are too small for an A4 letter?
Well, we can but hope.

Anonymous said...

I think, actually, that the free market has delivered. We don't like political activists bombarding our letter boxes with literature we don't want to read. The market has therefore provided letterbox solutions that make life as difficult as possible for said political activists.

Tim, you need to destroy this socialist/authoritarian streak in you before it spreads, cancer-like ;-)

Tim Roll-Pickering said...

I have yet to meet a person who deliberately arranged their letter box to be such as it is so as to make deliveries hard. As most people never post things through their own boxes it is more common to find they are unaware of the problems - one telling story by a right-winger signing the petition has been of how his family could never work out why their paper was always shredded or why they regularly heard swearing at 7am. Then a family friend worked for the local post office one summer and told them their box was considered to be one of the worst in the country. Comments from others suggest this is not unique.

Anonymous said...

Fine. But isn't this the sort of regulation we generally leave to Brussels?

Tim Roll-Pickering said...

I really don't believe the standardisation of letterboxes is a prerequisite for "European unity" even if I were enthusiastic for the EU. So it is to Westminster I look.

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