Why do we undermine our most valuable assets?

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http://www.johnogroat-journal.co.uk/new ... sets_.html

By Jamie Stone MSP
Published: 11 January, 2008

MY association with post offices, and the people who work there, goes back a long way. Right to the day I ran away from home.

I was brought up, as many readers will know, on a small farm on the north side of Tain. The farmhouse, now ruinous, was at the end of a lane that ran down the slope from the gasworks. It was up that lane that I headed when my mother finally proved to be too much.

She had skelped my backside really hard – although, in retrospect, she may have had right on her side. After all, I had thrown her bag of spare bits of wool on the fire.

It was Jock Finlay "the Post" who met me at the top of the lane and asked me where I was going. When I told him, he merely said, "I don't think so."

And that was that. A young life, of milking eighteen cows, and then later on making crowdie, still lay before me.

And while I am looking back, I bet that many people my age and older will remember the shiny red Royal Mail coach, the first one behind the black British Railways steam locomotive, and in front of the passenger coaches, headed north to Wick and Thurso, or south to Inverness.

Beside our lane was one field, and at the end of the field was the railway line. Far more than any watch or clock, my childhood day was marked and divided by the regular succession of trains that went by. I have never forgotten.

This is the Night Mail crossing the border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner and the girl next door.

I quote the first lines of one of W.H. Auden's best-loved poems.

In the past, the whole edifice of the post office network – from the letter posted south of the border to the Royal Mail coach to Jock Finlay's bag – was really one of the triumphs of 19th-century Britain. It was rapidly copied the world over – and in this country it has enjoyed a special place in the nation's collective heart. Would that politicians were as well loved as those who work in post offices and the postal services...

What is it about this country, that we make insane decisions and undermine some of our most valuable assets? Are lots of other countries queuing up to shut post offices? Not as far as I am aware. (My wife comes from County Armagh in Northern Ireland – a hop, skip and a jump away from counties Monaghan, Cavan and Leitrim in the Republic of Ireland. I go to these parts of rural Eire on a regular basis, and I am quite sure that there is no mad talk of shutting down post offices over there).

As you will read in this paper, the sword hangs over a number of post offices in this constituency, and all over the Highlands. It is potentially very bad news, particularly for those people who currently use the post offices under threat.

If one pauses and reflects on the services provided by post offices, in addition to buying stamps and posting letters, the list is impressive.

Additional service delivery would give our threatened post offices the extra work that might just prompt a rethink by the statistics-infatuated UK Government, says Jamie Stone MSP.

Old-age pensions can be collected at post offices; so too (despite the Government continually undermining it) can child benefit be collected. Hydro bills, telephone bills, mobile phone bills, council tax and council rent can all be paid at our post offices.

They are part of the weave of society, both rural and urban. And when we think of the poorer or elderly, possibly with less access to transport, then it becomes clear that post offices are even more important.

And yet the Government is causing some of them to close. (Make no mistake, all talk of "consultation" doesn't carry much weight in the face of what seems to me to be a pretty clear intent. An intent to see closures in the near future.)

Westminster colleagues – including John Thurso MP – are rightly making the case for the retention of these post offices. They should be backed to the hilt in their endeavours. They are the right people in the right place, for these matters will ultimately be decided by the UK Government.

For our own part, here in Holyrood, we can express our opinions and make them known in London. Hopefully this lends a small shoulder to the wheel for John Thurso and his team. We can also do one other thing.

This week I tabled the following Written Question:

S3W-8272 Jamie Stone: To ask the Scottish Executive what outreach public services, such as advice on student finance and concessionary rail and bus travel, it is considering providing through Scotland's network of urban and rural post offices.

The reason behind this question will be clear. It is about getting beyond simply saying that the UK Government is wrong; it is about finding out what positive action the Scottish Government is considering in order to underpin and boost our rural post offices.

Additional service delivery (extra to the pensions, child benefit etc., I listed above) will give the post offices the extra work that might just persuade a statistics-infatuated London Government that closing them would be a backward step. I await the answer with great interest.

This is a chance for the Scottish Government to do something different from the UK Government – to give the post offices extra services, rather than taking them away as London has.

I wonder if Jock Finlay, as he took me back home that day, would ever have imagined that it would come to this. In his time it was inconceivable that any right-thinking Government would undermine something so important.