Star comment: Daily post is service of value
Having lost village schools, local post offices, and a whole raft of valued services in rural areas, another one is being lined up to be taken away.
This time it is the daily postal service. There are fears that this will not be sacrosanct in the future for Shropshire and Mid Wales and that you could get your letters and parcels every other day.
And so it will be a continuation of the trend in which people in rural areas are treated like second-class citizens who are last in the queue for everything – except when they are first in the queue for cash-saving cuts.
This is a modern world in which technology has advanced at an amazing pace and yet in some respects services in country areas are getting worse rather than better.
In the case of the mail, it is shocking to think that Salopians would be better served by the system of 100 years or so ago, in which letters and postcards were delivered so quickly that they were the equivalent of ringing people up today, than they are now.
The reason is that back then it was a postal service.
Now it is a postal business, and if elements of a business are either not profitable or not sufficiently profitable, the hard-headed business solution is simply to axe them.
The Country Land and Business Association says that many parts of our region rely on the post and any change to the universal Royal Mail service could spell disaster for people who live or work in rural areas.
This is an issue which is wider than simply looking at accounts of profit and loss.
It is about what sort of society we want and what services we should be able to expect as a given.
It is also about respecting the needs of people, in this case largely the older folk who have been brought up with the post and are less likely to use email and texts – not that you can send a parcel by such a method anyway.
An environment in which nothing is sacred but the making of a profit does not necessarily make for a better world.
It makes for a world in which sections of the community are neither served nor looked after.
Loss of the daily post would make Shropshire and Mid Wales lesser places.
Some things are worth keeping.
