This Labour Government is determined to destroy another key part of the very fabric of our community in Muswell Hill and the wider area with its insane closure of the Alexandra Park Road Post Office and several others.

Our local Post Offices are a much loved and vital part of our community. But Labour’s obsession with trying to squeeze out yet more financial savings (whilst wasting millions in other parts of government) would see another 2,500 Post Offices close across the country as they force the Royal Mail to follow their central targets.

For us locally it’s not just Alexandra Park that faces losing its Post Office – Highgate Village, Weston Park, Ferme Park Road and Salisbury Road are all also facing the same axe. Not all Post Offices face the axe mind – Labour is not wanting to chop any of the three Post Offices all located within the Palace of Westminster. So – no Post Office for Highgate, but three just for the Palace of Westminster!

With a very short consultation period (surprise!), we all need to pull together to fight to save our Post Offices. We need Alexandra Park Road’s Post Office. People use it and like it. How dare they decide that it should close and we must all off to some other Post Office instead?

And given the problems with traffic congestion in the area – how short-sighted to want to take away another local service and make many people, especially those who find it hard to move around, to take to the roads, whether by car or bus, to get to their services. In particular, for older people, people with disabilities, mothers with pushchairs and so on – think how much more difficult lives would become without a local facility.

This proposal has all the hallmarks of out-of-touch bureaucrats who don’t understand the local situation running amok.

For some older people, their walk to their local Post Office is the only time they go out of their house all week. Labour don’t seem to understand the nature of the life-line and fundamental structural nature the local Post Office plays in the fabric of our daily lives.

Some of the Post Offices facing closure are in fact making a profit – so the argument that they aren’t viable doesn’t stack up! Even where their viability is less certain – with political will there could be Council and Government services put through a local Post Office. Instead – the Government has simply stripped away and eroded their functions.

So – please back the campaign to save Alexandra Park Road Post Office and sign up at ourcampaign.org.uk/haringeypostoffices.

We must demonstrate the strength of public feeling at this short-sighted and gratuitous attack on our local services and community.

(c) Lynne Featherstone, 2008