Thank goodness a Royal Mail insider has leaked that at least 11 post offices are earmarked for the chop in Camden and Barnet (Named: secret list of post offices to close, H&H February 14). People must react strongly now. New Labour stooges at the Royal M

Thank goodness a Royal Mail insider has leaked that at least 11 post offices are earmarked for the chop in Camden and Barnet (Named: secret list of post offices to close, H&H February 14).

People must react strongly now. New Labour stooges at the Royal Mail and the Post Office continue to destroy the service which provides the economic support for local communities and protects our democracy.

Post Office Workers and their Union the CWU are doing their best to protect this vital resource; whilst highly-paid stuffed shirts like Allan Leighton and Adam Crozier asset strip and destroy the fabric of this vital institution.

If our communities are to survive and pull together through the hard times ahead we will need our post offices more than ever! The lack of intelligence and forward thinking by the Brown government, in its destruction of the effective limbs of the civil service through centralisation, is only equalled in their blatant destruction of our postal services.

The time has come for us to consider whether communities should take legal action to prevent the sabotaging of their local economies. Certainly the London Assembly and mayoral elections will be an opportunity for voters to show New Labour that their failure to support the Post Office makes them unfit to govern.

Residents, postal workers and unions must react swiftly. In Finchley Central, where we lost the Ballards Lane Post Office, small businesses reliant on it have been badly betrayed. Some people's businesses have gone under as a direct result of the closure.

Pensioners and parents have lost a valuable focus for their communities. Capital built up over generations has been syphoned from the local community.

We should all be demanding the resignation of Allan Leighton and Adam Crozier; for destroying the local economies of villages and town centres around England with their shortsighted closures.

Unions, workers and residents should also consider the building of a national demonstration against closures across the country, marching from the headquarters of the Royal Mail and the Post Office to Downing Street.

Miranda Dunn

Green Party Candidate

Barnet & Camden

Your report that Royal Mail plans a purge of post offices in Haringey comes as no surprise to me, as someone who watched the behaviour of Royal Mail senior management during the days of the CWU postal workers strike action last year.

Your readers may reflect, if they did not then, that postal workers in trying to save their jobs and working conditions were also trying to save our postal service from a management determined to run it as a private business rather than a public service.

At root of course it is a political question. All Haringey post offices could be kept open on any criteria, applied on a fraction of the billions that the government continues to waste on bailing out Northern Rock

Keith Flett

Chair, Haringey TUC