March 2: The forgotten post offices

So much for promises. In some cases, customers in this region have been waiting for as long as seven years now for their local branch to reopen, while 38 post offices have been closed for at least a year, 15 of these for more than five years.

Indeed, so much time has passed since these post offices first shut up shop that hopes of re-opening have simply been overtaken by technology, with more and more traditional post-office transactions, such as paying for TV licences and car-tax renewals, now easily available online.

Yet it could all have been so different had the Government kept another promise to turn post offices into what it termed a “front office” for government services, producing a fresh source of revenue that would make them much more attractive as business options.

The effect of this inertia, in those villages where the post office remains closed, has been a further fraying of the bonds that bind together and sustain rural communities. Post offices, after all, are not merely service centres, but vital meeting places where the elderly, the less mobile and the geographically and socially isolated can meet and chat.

Indeed, these are the very people who are not always at ease using a computer – even if there is good broadband service available, hardly the case in many rural areas – and who are therefore left to rely on public transport, another failing in many rural parts of the region, in their search for a post office that is open for business.

Another example, then, of a key rural lifeline being left to wither by a Conservative-led government that is supposed to look after the countryside but which so frequently seems to take rural Britain – and its support – for granted.

Moscow murder

THE THOUSANDS of mourners marching through Moscow yesterday will take little comfort from the fact that Vladimir Putin has taken personal charge of the investigation into the murder of Boris Nemtsov, the opposition politician assassinated on Friday.

Indeed, the committee investigating his death has already listed several possible reasons for Mr Nemtsov’s murder, without once mentioning his fierce and sustained opposition to the Russian President’s rule.

Mr Nemtsov, however, has joined a long list of Kremlin critics who have met untimely ends since Mr Putin came to power. And regardless of whether the President was personally involved, this latest assassination is yet another sign of the instability rapidly overtaking Russia as Mr Putin’s nationalist rule becomes ever more aggressive and unpredictable and any hint of dissent or free thinking is portrayed as a betrayal of the nation.

With Russian forces stoking up civil war in Ukraine, other former Soviet states becoming increasingly nervous and Russian aircraft making regular intimidatory visits to the edge of British airspace, it is clear that Mr Putin is becoming more and more emboldened with each crushing victory over those who would oppose him.

The West, meanwhile, rapidly cutting defence spending and still celebrating the “peace dividend” that was supposed to result from the end of the Cold War, seems unable to do anything other than watch and wait.

Back to reality

CONVERTING PARLIAMENT into cheap housing and moving the Commons and Lords to Hull may or may not result in the level of savings envisaged by the Generation Rent campaign proposing the idea.

But it would undoubtedly bring about a brush with reality for a Westminster elite that gives the impression of having no concept of how most ordinary voters live their lives.

Spending more and more time in a city which is itself increasingly removed from the rest of the nation, cocooned in a world where most of those they meet are people of money and influence, many politicians have simply become removed from reality, as the cases of Sir Malcolm Rifkind and Jack Straw, filmed apparently offering their services for cash, have recently demonstrated.

In such circumstances, what better guarantee is there of a return trip to reality than a move to the refreshing environs of Yorkshire? And what a pity it is that this suggestion has no chance of being taken seriously.