When did Alan Johnson abandon post offices?

[TrueBlueTerrier]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main ... do2206.xml

The British public wants to secure the future of an accountable, efficient and socially responsive Post Office. Communities are losing a focal point which for years has been a symbol of everything that's British."

Who could possibly disagree with that powerfully expressed sentiment in a week when the Government's majority fell to only 20 in the Commons vote on the post office closure programme, as Labour MPs with marginal constituencies took fright.
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The view was articulated by none other than Alan Johnson, Labour MP, Health Secretary, former postman, and first-class hypocrite.

He expressed those views in 1993, when he was head of the powerful Union of Communications Workers. Johnson was on the warpath over leaked internal documents revealing that 200 town centre post offices faced the axe.

Today the Cabinet in which he serves has approved proposals to shut no fewer than 2,500 post office branches in Britain, many in the countryside that this Government long ago gave up all pretence of trying to understand.

Yet in 1993, Johnson, an angry and ambitious man whose skilful stewardship of the union deservedly helped him secure a safe Labour seat, warned that closing the 200 post offices earmarked for the axe would "rip the heart out of communities".

So what, exactly, does he think the current programme, which he supports, is doing to the rural communities? The post office is the heart of the village community. If the post office goes, the village shop goes, too; the hub of the community is removed.

When Johnson the union boss could think for himself, he enlisted Bell Pottinger, Margaret Thatcher's favourite advertising agency, to kill off the proposed privatization of the post office network. Bell Pottinger ran a masterful campaign and John Major's incompetent administration had to surrender in the face of a serious Conservative backbench rebellion.

But the Labour Government has a much bigger majority, and so this mean-spirited, politically naive policy is being rammed through, albeit after the local elections are safely out of the way.

Yet a third of Johnson's Cabinet colleagues, while voting for the cuts this week, have gone back to their constituencies and campaigned against any local closures. The hypocrisy of it all.

Johnson, a Trotskyite-turned-Blairite moderniser, has knocked many times on the front door of the Prime Minister's official country residence in his former life. Chequers was on his postman's round. He should pop round to Chequers again and tell the Prime Minister that the current closure programme is even more destructive and politically damaging to the Government than it was in 1993.

[baldrick]

Johnson was never a "Trotskyite".
According to Wikipedia he was aligned to the Communist Party when he was a CWU Branch Officer.

[plodsie]

Personally I think he is a two-facedsh-ite.