AS Joni Mitchell memorably sang “You don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone.”
Huddersfield and surrounding areas are now facing losing 17 post offices.
The latest plans to close nine offices, announced yesterday, made posters sit up and think – unfortunately for the Post Office it was about how bad they can sometimes be.
Waspish said he went to a post office a while ago.
He added: “I asked them for some 50p pieces for the till, as I’d run out overnight. The response I got? ‘No you can’t. We don’t give to people who haven’t got an account so you will have to open one and we haven’t got any forms to fill in ... NEXT!’
“Is it any wonder they are shutting faster than a confessional door on a Sunday morning.”
TommyDGNR8 added: “The massacre of the post office is the result of Tony’s attempt to out-Maggie his idol.
“Even at the height of her powers; having sold off British Airways, BP, gas, telecoms, water, Rolls Royce and all the rest; she blanched at the idea of ‘a privatisation too far’. When the suggestion was made by one commentator, she dismissed it by saying simply, ‘it’s the Royal Mail, dear’.
“Her successor made moves in that direction – going as far as getting the Queen’s permission for her image to continue to appear on stamps after sell-off. His government, though, was dragged down by years of sleaze, deception and incompetence finally catching up with it before he could pull the trigger.”
Tommy then goes onto Tony Blair and his programme to remove public sector industries and open them up to ‘competition’.
He adds: “In 1997, we had a world-class service; two deliveries per day, 90% of mail arriving within 24 hours. We were told, though, that it was ‘losing’ millions of pounds a year and that it needed to be modernised. And we accepted it.
“What we should have realised was that it wasn't ‘losing’ anything at all. It simply cost more than we were paying. We should have demanded that the pricing structure be revamped to cover the cost of maintaining the service.
“We should have added our voices to the few dissenters who warned that the move to pay benefits directly into bank accounts was designed to undermine counter services, but they were leftie-union scum and were always scaremongering.”
