Post Office closures: Labour's double standards
A letter to the South London Press from Cllr Andrew Gibson (Conservative Councillor, Gipsy Hill):Your correspondent Stan Hardy has slipped up in saying that the Gipsy Road Post Office is outside the Dulwich and West Norwood constituency (MPs Forsake Us Over POs, March 28), but he is right to highlight the double standards of the local Labour MP, Tessa Jowell. I contacted Ms Jowell recently, urging her to vote to suspend the closure programme that will see some 2,500 post offices close nationwide. She replied that she was very much in favour of the closure programme nationally; she just does not want it to apply in her patch. She ignores the convention that when a minister disagrees with a Government policy, she should do the honourable thing and resign. Instead, Ms Jowell has put protecting her job in Whitehall before the interests of her constituents - a sharp contrast indeed to her more principled Parliamentary colleague Kate Hoey, MP for Vauxhall, who talked the talk and walked the walk by supporting the Conservative Parliamentary motion to suspend the closures.
Our Labour MP told me that the Post Office network was losing millions of pounds. She fails to recognise that the Post Office is not a normal business, but has a public service element - it is the Government, after all, which places upon the PO a nationwide service delivery obligation. In that light, are these millions "losses", or are they costs for a service that the public value? And why has the Government reduced the range of services that Post Offices provide?
Finally, our Labour MP lectured me on the damage done by a PO branch reduction project last century. Her argument is, therefore, that while the previous Government was wrong to reduce the network last century, Labour is right to cut back the network still further today. What is dispiriting about her comments is not the "Yah-boo" political element, but the utter lack of common sense and intelligent discussion. Her confusion derives from wanting to run with the fox while chasing with the hounds. Hypocrisy indeed, and another indicator that Labour has lost touch with ordinary people.
Labels: Andrew Gibson, Letters, Post Offices
posted by Cllr John Whelan on Tuesday, April 01, 2008
