The Green Party And The Lib-Dems Stole Our Post Office

The Green Party And The Lib-Dems Stole Our Post Office, originally uploaded by Colonel Blink.

After over a hundred years, from tomorrow there will be no Post Office on Rosary Road. There was a local campaign to keep it open which looked as if might succeed: the grounds for closing it were not that it was running at a loss (it wasn't) or that it was not fulfilling a social need but that it was within two miles of the Central Post Office in the Castle Mall. A petition was started, various members of the great and the good were lobbied, it was publicised in the press.

What happened next beggar's belief. In the run up to the local elections the two main contenders, the Green Party and the Lib Dems decided they would take over the campaign. They each started their own petitions -hence diluting the original. They each ran rival campaigns to save Rosary Road Post Office. Quite simply they muscled in. Party officials and volunteers announced they would handle it and there was no room for the non alligned. In the two weeks before the election we would recieve seperate newsletters from both parties every day boasting about their individual efforts to save the Office. The last one arrived at midday through my letterbox on election day.

Promises were made. Both parties proposed to lobby Lord this, Lady that, etc. Both were going to travel up to London to see this committee, that quango.

And then nothing. The election was won by the Greens and the Lib Dems withdrew their campaign. There was a line in the paper two weeks later that if anyone wanted the Lib Dem petition they should contact them. No one is sure what happened to the Green one. After a fortnight of Green representitives banging on our doors and putting leaflets through our letterboxes none of us have heard a word from the victorious party about anything. No letters, no meetings and definitely nothing about the Post Office campaign.

In the meantime the totally sidelined Friends Of The Rosary Road Post Office campaign had lost all momentum and the branch was earmarked for closure.

Bevan famously described the Conservative Party as "Less Than Vermin", I think we are justified in adding the Greens and the Lib Dems to this.

It is not all bad news. Thursday has been designated "Kick a Green Party member in the bollocks day" and I live in hope that I will live to hear Fidel radio his secret orders to start the revolution in Thorpe Hamlet. I know who I will be stringing up from the lamp posts outside the Old Post Office on that glorious dawn.

These are my views and no one else's