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Resistance to post office closures plans is useless
• THE Post Office directors, having started a massive local office closure programme some years ago, will continue with yet more and resistance is useless.
Marc Glendinning notes that the UK, acting under instructions from the European Commission, has to open the mail system to competition while also having to limit subsidy to £150 million per annum (Blame the closure of our post offices on Brussels, May 29).
Last month some national papers reported that a commission was to report to the business secretary on the future of the system. Among other things it fears for the future of same price deliveries irrespective of distance.
A mention was made by a paper that the Royal Mail “received a £3.9 billion rescue package a year ago”.
That is a lot of money so perhaps the New Journal can publicise the detail.
Mr Glendinning speaks for an organisation – Democracy Movement. Is this a new political party? One is needed. The hybrid New Labour one has run out of steam, the party in funding crisis, with bankruptcy looming now that Tony’s millionaires have left the sinking ship, and the trades unions now looked to for a rescue package.
Those unions, whose members are not ogres but ordinary employed people, which founded Labour to represent them in Parliament, have seen over the past century a great improvement in general conditions.
Since 1979 both the major parties have come to office to great acclaim for extended periods, only in the end to fail. Thatcher flogged off the family silver – the utilities – even the Trustee Savings Bank which belonged to its depositors, that went too.
Municipal housing was sold to tenants without an obligation on local authorities to build replacements, much needed.
John Major did for the unified national railway system by breaking it into companies, which are now subsidised by billions of pounds, much more than British Rail got.
The poll tax saw Margaret off and “new” Labour swept to power in 1997. That hybrid is now discredited, and the country is left with blood on its hands over the Iraq debacle.
Who can trust any party which colludes in state torture?
A new generation has matured since 1979 and many will not know of matters detailed above.
History is not a priority in the comprehensive education system. Let a new system arise to represent moderates in Parliament and to enact laws imposing fair tax with loopholes abolished. This could be a Common Wealth party recruiting from those disillusioned by the present mess of politics. So what about that?
Skip Murphy
Prince of Wales Road, NW1
Lessons from France
• MARC Glendinning (Letters, May 29) blamed the closure of our small post offices on Brussels directives.
I feel there must be more to it than this.
I was in France a couple of weeks ago and noticed particularly that even large villages had their own post offices, often in their own buildings. (This is at a time when even small towns in Britain often don’t have a separate post office any more but have to manage with a couple of post office positions lurking at the back of a shop.)
Even if there is only a shop and a bar, there’s usually a post office in most French settlements. France are also under the control of Brussels, so why are they in a position to offer the kind of service which Royal Mail is quite genuinely struggling to provide?
J Woolf, NW6
The need to compete
• FOR the Democracy Movement, if someone sneezes it is the fault of Brussels (Blame the closure of our post offices on Brussels, May 29).
Never mind that it was the Tony Blair government which prevented the Post Office from collecting TV licences, and stopped the Post Office from processing utility bills and closed the Post Office Savings Bank – all of which EU competition directives would allow.
The main reason for the crisis in our post offices is the refusal of successive British governments to allow them the level playing field that they need to compete with the High Street.
Ron Watts,
Howitt Road, NW3
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