Cut somewhere else

Tweet I can't remember the exact detail, but there was a Spitting Image scene where the budget deficit was being explained to Ronald Reagan.  It went something like, "Mr President, suppose you have ten apples, and you take away three trillion; how many do you have left?", to which Reagan replied, "Oh, I don't know, but there must be a few at least".

It came to mind when I read this report, or more precisely the comments of Paul Davies AM, on rural transport this morning.  Transport is a major issue in rural areas, of course.  And I agree with him that we need to increase the frequency of train services to Fishguard in particular and West Wales in general - although I still think that his repeated calls for dualling the A40 are a completely inappropriate response.  The point is, though, that rural transport issues will never be resolved by the private sector; they require a large dose of investment from public funds.  I recognise that, and am prepared to argue for the sort of public sector spending regime which can deliver that.

Mr Davies, though, does not.  Only yesterday, he and his party were arguing that health spending - note, spending, not delivery - should be protected from any cuts at all, which means larger cuts elsewhere.  He and his party have argued consistently that the public sector needs to be cut by a large amount and in a short timescale to rectify the deficit.  I disagree with him and his party on both of those; but there's nothing at all wrong with him putting those arguments.  There's something more than a little dishonest, though, about then calling for significant extra government expenditure in his own constituency.

It smacks of the all-too-common refrain of people who support cutting public expenditure, as long as the cuts happen somewhere else, and to somebody else.

It's consultation, Jim,

Tweet …but not as we know it.

The post office closure programme has now reached Carmarthenshire and Pembrokeshire, with a total of ten post offices across this constituency earmarked for closure or downgrading. It’s already rolled through Powys, as Glyn Davies has posted on more than one occasion. Closing the post offices is only part of the danger. Many post offices are operated as part of local shops; the post office salary often makes the difference between viability and failure; so it’s not just post offices that we could be losing.

What’s really staggering is how little real scope there is for local views to influence the process. All the key decisions have already been made, and they’ve been made not by the post office, but by the government. The government has decided how many post offices will close, the government has decided that the closures will be compulsory rather than by agreement, and the government has set the criteria for closure. (The government, of course, is the only shareholder in the Post Office.)

The Post Office have been left holding a consultation exercise in which the only real question is whether they’ve selected the right ones to close, and in which the grounds for challenging those decisions are very limited. It’s hardly a meaningful consultation exercise about an issue which will have a major impact on a large number of rural communities.

Listening to representatives of the Post Office explaining the process and their decisions to community councillors last night, I was reminded of the words of Aneurin Bevan – “There is no reason to attack the monkey when the organ-grinder is also present”. The problem is that on this occasion the organ grinder was very much absent, obviously happy to let the monkey take the flak (with no disrespect intended to the Post Office representatives).

Of course our post offices are facing some real problems as the number of people visiting them has fallen and the amount of business which they transact has reduced. Again, however, the hand of government lurks behind much of this. It isn't an accident that services such as TV licensing were removed from Post Offices; it’s a deliberate decision. Government, and its agencies, have chosen to use services such as PayPoint in preference to using post offices. And the threat of removing the Post Office Card Account from post offices is another potential blow.

It is claimed that the government are acting to reduce the £150 million subsidy which they pay to the Post Office. However, the value of services withdrawn from Post Offices by government decision was £168 million in 2006/7.

Closure isn’t an inevitable fact of life, but it is an inevitable result of government decisions, past and present. A truly meaningful consultation, and a truly meaningful commitment to protecting post offices would involve a review of those government decisions, not an assumption that they are inviolate. We need the organ grinder to listen as well.

PS I don’t know quite what to make of the Tories’ position on this issue. They are making a lot of the right noises, but how sincere are they? They did, after all, close 3,500 post offices themselves when they were in government, and they are still banging on about reducing government expenditure (such as the subsidy being paid to post offices?) and taxes. So how would they fund the network?