Post Office Closure Programme Hypocrisy

Good on Edinburgh city council for voting to admonish the Labour government for their post offic closure programme.

I am presently fighting a number of closures in the area I represent, and each and every time have come up against Labour politician strutting about saying that they are campaigning to do likewise. The hypocrisy of these individuals is galling.

These are the self same individuals who actually voted for the programme of 2,500 closures of local post office branches across the UK, and then have the brazen audacity to speak out against them. You have to admire them if nothing else for their sheer brass neck.

One such Labour politician was addressing a public meeting organised by a local community council last week that I was also attending to state that they had voted for the continued UK government subsidy to the Post Office. Aye, well that may be true up to a point, but the same individual failed to mention that they also simultaneously supported the government's closure programme that now threatens the particular local branch in question being discussed at the public meeting.

Thankfully people don't - much as New Labour likes to think they do at times - zip up the back of their heid. People weren't buying any of it and that particular individual Labour MP got a hard time of it at the meeting.

What is striking though is that this level of "subsidy" (or what we could equally term public investment in a public service) is some 175million pounds annually. This pales into insignificance by comparison with the billions lavished on the war in Iraq by Blair then Brown, or the 100billion pounds that a new generation of nuclear weapons may cost the taxpayer.

It seems that the UK government can find all the money it wants to maintain nuclear arms, but heaven forfend that they might have to contribute to the maintenance of a Post Office, that they still own on our behalf.

That leads me on to the other galling part of the presentation of this closure programme. That the Post Office is somehow being presented as a failing business. It is of course nonsense to define it as such. It is a government owned public service, just the way the NHS is. Do we talk about the failure of the NHS because it isn't an income generator? No, and it would be nonsense to do so.

I believe the same is true of the Post Office network as well. It is more than just a business. It is a public service that all people are able to use.

Even if one was to accept that it is a business and should make money like any other, then it is also galling to remember that it was in the black when New Labour came to power. However a deliberate campaign of willful neglect and running it down has been employed by them in government, stripping service after service away from the so called "People's Post Office". Is it any wonder that it fails to make the profit it once did?

One final thought...if the Post Office is a business, then why, when it is apparently failing, does their Chief Executive reportedly earn 1million pounds annually through his wage, pension and bonuses? And why is it their customers who are being punished through this closure programme? They are the last people who bear the blame for the "failure" of this "business".