WHO'LL DELIVER A LIFELINE TO FAILING POST OFFICES?
The Government doesn't care about PO closures
By Frederick Forsyth
IT NOW looks as if not 2,500 but 4,000 small post offices and sub-post offices face obliteration in the near future.
That these closures are ripping the guts out of even more villages concerns our countryside-hating Government not a jot.
What lies at the root of the problem is one very simple question. Is the postal service known as the Royal Mail, hundreds of years old, a true service to the nation or is it a commercial enterprise that must make a profit or go into liquidation like any other loss-making business?
If it is a service to us all, like the fire brigade or the ambulance service, then logically its unprofitability is compensated by public funds without complaint. If it is to be a business and only a business, like Tesco, then it must be allowed to act like one – refusing to undertake loss-making tasks.
At the root of the issue is the universal post. Basically, I can post a letter in Chelsea addressed to next-door Kensington for the price of a stamp; it will get there and leave a small profit for the Post Office. But the same stamp must take that letter to the Outer Hebrides, which cannot be done save at a big loss.
To compensate for these losses, the Post Office has long been contracted by government, for a fee, to offer other services – Giro cheques, pensions, licence-renewal and so on. Then three things happened.
A couple of years ago the EU, our masters in Brussels, decreed that all services must be opened up to
private-sector competition. With awesome stupidity our Government obeyed to the letter but allowed the private sector to cherry pick the lucrative services yet left the Post Office forced by law to continue the loss-makers. The result has been a disaster for the finances.
And by the way only British politicians and civil servants insist on destroying their country to please Brussels. The Continentals simply ignore what doesn’t suit them.
Factor Two was that half the remaining services are now accomplished “online”. Factor Three was that Government removed contract after contract from the Post Office. Only the loss-making services are left. This is typical of Labour. Destroy the viability of what used to work perfectly well, then scream “Oooooh, you’re not viable. You’ll have to be closed down.”
Here are two more ruinous developments enacted by Brussels recently: Home Information Packs and garbage disposal. A few years ago we had a perfectly good housing market and a regular and efficient garbage disposal system. Both are now in chaos.
And two more EU burdens just announced. Neither AA nor RAC can tow you home any more if the towing vehicle has no tachograph but is more than 62 miles from its base. Each van now has to dump you at the kerbside until another tow-truck can pick you up.
And soon Continental hauliers will be able to fill up on cheap French/ Belgian fuel, cross the Channel with a load, deliver it and then take on up to seven more local deliveries before going home, thus driving British hauliers into receivership.
The politicians of all three parties refuse to acknowledge their own utter impotence because they insist on continuing the pretence that they are meaningful people.
As that honest Tory backbencher Peter Lilley suggests: as they have exported to Brussels 70 per cent of their powers why don’t they take a 70 per cent pay cut?
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WHO'LL DELIVER A LIFELINE TO FAILING POST OFFICES?
07.06.08, 11:16am
Ah but! Freddie, you know that the Tories will not hold a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty let alone pull us out of Europe. AND you support them!
• Posted by: JohnnyB • Report Comment
GOOD ARTICLE MR FOESYTHE
07.06.08, 10:51am
The post offices are a very valuable service to the nation. They are far more valuable to the UK than say Gordon Brown, therefore I know which service to this country I would rather see the back of.
I have a main post office in the high street about a mile away and one a similar distance away which is a community Post Office that doubles as a shop newsagent etc. The main post office is ok if you can spare an hour to get to the counter. It is always packed and is the most frustrating place I know of other than our local Vehicle licencing centre.
The small post office is excellent. There are still queues of course, but the atmosphere is not like a chicken battery plant as is the main PO. It is a friendly place where the owners know your name and converse. It is properly communal and very human. This is the key. The closures demanded by the EU Komissar for competition and agreed to by Gauleiters Miliband and Brown, are soulless diktats and directives that have everything to do with numbers and ZERO to do with life.
That for me sums up the EU. It is anti life. Democracy is Pro-Life. I know what I wish to live under, and it is not the EU Soviet, or their gauleiters like Blair and Miliband and straw and Hutton and Brown.
I want my democracy back Mr Forsythe. With democracy we will be able to have our post offices, for the simple reason we will bloody well vote out the bounders if we don't get them.
EU= Zero Accountability(do exactly as they like)
• Posted by: blam • Report Comment
THE POST OFFICE CORRUPTION.
06.06.08, 10:07pm
Another good one from Freddie. I do like to be enlightened and not fogged off a la labour's idea of an excuse for destroying the English way of life. I actually feel sometimes that we have a foreign "government" stifling us and doing so much harm. You have filled me in very concisely about the post office fiasco. It is a disgusting mess , well worthy of the cloth cappers. The collective energy of labours mind power would light up a twenty five watt bulb,a nd quite frankly I just hope that the damage done can be put right once the tories get back in. I've known them do massive repair jobs before, so let's just hope.
• Posted by: bluenote • Report Comment
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