So now we have no post offices in Belsize where once we had three. It’s a sorry tale. The England’s Lane sub post office shut its counters last week. It was closed despite the fact that I and others came up with plenty of good reasons to keep it open. It was closed despite the fact that more than 5,000 residents signed petitions calling for it not to be shut.
The government and anti-Europeans try to blame an EU directive that says postal services have to be opened up by 2011. But no one should be in any doubt that our continental neighbours see post offices as essential services. They will not be allowed to close even if their ownership changes.
This was not Europe’s fault. Nor was it the sub post master’s fault as has been implied in your pages. Jonathan Cohen has struggled to keep his sub post office open these last few years even as the government has steadily taken away more and more services from it. He didn’t want to close and he wasn’t, as some have suggested, “bribed” to close. The government had decided in advance that this sub post office and 2,500 others like it would be shut. Post Office Ltd was the executioner. Sub post masters like Mr Cohen had absolutely no choice in the matter. We should feel sympathy for him and his staff, not abuse him. And we should wish his pharmacies in Belsize and Highgate well as they face an uncertain future without the footfall provided by the post office counters.
It was the Tories that began this massacre of our post office network. They closed 4,000 branches. The Labour Party has simply continued that policy of death by a thousand cuts. Of the main political parties only the Liberal Democrats believe that every community should have a post office and that a post office network should be seen as an essential service, like the police or schools or hospitals. Would you rather have ID cards, nuclear missiles, a continued military presence in Iraq, or a post office in every community? I know which I’d prefer.
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