Selling off the nation's assets affects local communities too

There is a "proposal" subject to "consultation" to close a local Post Office, replacing it with some sort of unspecified lesser service at the local W.H. Smith. This may not sound like the end of the world: a sensible reduction in cost of accommodation at least. This is how most outsourcing initiatives are presented: as sensible business options, because to those behind them, business is God and their only yardstick for success is money. So Probation, Royal Mail, NHS services and so much more are redefined as inefficient businesses so that new "owners" can be brought in to run them, with improvement in financial results the goal.

We hear much from workforce, Unions, Opposition and the public objecting to these sell-offs of services which have been in public sector hands for decades; so much so that perhaps the partisan arguments have become almost too well-known to retain their real import. Return if you will to Uckfield High Street and the Crown Post Office. Here work several experienced and skilled people, part of the community, known to and liked by their customers, providing the full service of the Post Office. If the building is closed and the "service" is contracted (note the double entendre) to WHS, what will be the consequences? First, staff will lose jobs with all that can mean to them, their families and the community. Second, the services will be curtailed, as the new "service" will be delivered by less expert and worse remunerated staff and exclude some elements for which WHS is not licensed, such as passport and driving licence applications, meaning that customers will have to go to a main Post Office in another town completely, involving cost and inconvenience. Third, the trust and relationships between customers and staff will be lost as the agenda of the new owner will clearly be different from that of a public service. And I am sure there will be more such deficits of a human kind, all in the name of money.

Money seems to be the only criterion for decision-making understood by this inhuman Coalition, whereas Labour has among its values mutuality, altruism and community. There is nothing wrong with defining performance using wider parameters than just cost and returns. Social cohesion; the needs of people of all means; doing things which may not be efficient; what is wrong with these?

Accepting the closure of Uckfield Crown Post Office is not the small thing it may at first sight appear, for it typifies how the country has been forced to accept the wholesale decimation of public assets and services in the names of money and the ideology of smaller government. I have become ashamed of my initial response to the threat of this closure - that it was not all that important - because it is a local illustration of what is happening all over the country and because I can see the real impact it will have on people in my community. It typifies too how rural needs are disproportionately subject to the models assumed to be effective in urban environments. Shame on those behind it.