Post Office closures are a roll-call of deaths in the community

The list of ill-fated Post Offices in the Birmingham Mail today (in print and on .net) is a tragedy.

The details we've managed to have leaked to us currently only cover the city of Birmingham. And within its boundaries alone, 24 Post Offices will shut.

Almost all are in the midst of real communities, some traditional and pristine (eg: Kings Norton Green), others more populated and struggling with inner city deprivation (eg: Sparkbrook Post Office, Stratford Road).

Many, including the Birmingham Mail, have expressed anger months and years ago at the suggestion that such offices might close. But recent indications by government figures that these closures are now unstoppable has increased this fury... and the rage bubbles over when you read through the full list.

Just the suburbs alone cut to the quick... as well as Kings Norton and Sparkbrook, we have offices now doomed in Kings Heath, Aston, Bartley Green, Balsall Heath, Birchfield, Handsworth, Harborne, Druid's Heath, Perry Barr (x2), Ladywood (x2), Hockley, Northfield, Perry Common, Hall Green, Perry Barr, Acocks Green, Erdington, Small Heath, Ward End and Sutton Coldfield (x2).

It's a roll-call of deaths in the community.

Old ladies, vulnerable people without jobs or bank accounts, the infirm or disabled... how many thousands in Birmingham alone will be dispossessed of a neighbourly office in which to go about their lives? This is wrong. This is more than wrong.

The Post Office, or course, have been busily calling the likes of me and other editors to 'explain the background' of the cuts and to 'hope' that we will balance our coverage and 'understand' their actions.

'Fraid not, guys. This time, we'll spill the beans on all the cowardly excuses.

No balance is possible in this story. Bland statements of 'justification' will come, of course, and we will report them... at the bottom of every story we tell in the next few weeks on the hearltless slashing of our traditional Post Offices. If we've got room.

"Blame the government," they squeal. We will. But we will also blame the faceless civil servants at the Post Offices who dare to hide behind the axe of Whitehall.

Today we have listed the simple facts of the Post Office cull. On Monday, we will picture each and every one of the closures so far revealed. And when the fuller picture comes out of other surrounding closures, in the Black Country, Solihull, Coleshill, Tamworth, Redditch and the likes, we will detail them too.

And whatever the Post Office bleats about the unstoppability of the cuts, if our readers respond the way I think they will the Birmingham Mail will fight this strangulation of our close-knit communities by a government that does not understand what they are doing. We will tell the stories of misery that every branch closure will cause. And we will tell these stories day after day, and take the cutting and perhaps huge petitions to the doors of Number 10 Downing Street, until somebody listens.

"But the network loses money," the Post Office mantra squeaks again. Yes? And so do the binmen, but are we about the scrap them? Shall we cut Crossing Wardens, because they make no money. How about getting rid of the church, and local libraries? Neither of those make money.

The Post Office is a long-standing public service. Of course an empty shop with no prospect of real footfall should be reviewed. But to suddenly close dozens, many busy, Post Offices without any real consultation or decent staged programme is the crass, demented action of civil servants blindly following a failing government's inexperienced ministerial blunders.

Mark my words, Postmaster General and Gordon Brown: this one's not going to slip under the net! See Monday's Birmingham Mail for more on this emerging campaign...