End of first class

I see Post Offices are under threat again with another 4,000 closures predicted on top of the 2,500 already in the pipeline. If the powers that be had their way we would end up with one post office, one pillar box and all letters would be delivered to one address by one postman on £300 a week. You can almost hear the champagne corks popping as the suits in charge celebrate their performance bonuses.

In the real world though something seems to be wrong somewhere. We flog off the railways and open up the buses to private companies whose sole objective is to make as much profit as they can and then pay them vast subsidies - £6 billion a year or so - to provide some semblance of a service.

Meanwhile Royal Mail, whose sole purpose is to provide a service, is charged by the Government with making a profit who put people in charge who see a balance sheet as some sort of holy scripture. If we can chuck money by the trainload at transport companies we don't own who are growing rich at our expense can anyone see any reason why we cannot subsidise an essential public service that we own?

The problem with accountants and businessmen who have never made anything but a profit or loss is that they can never see the cost of putting people out of work or closing offices which serve a community and in some cases are the heart of the community - they probably do not even understand the concept of community.

I have a suspicion that in the not too distant future Royal Mail will be deemed unviable and hived off to private enterprise and once more we will be paying vast subsidies to highly profitable companies to provide the service we are in the process of dismantling.