WHEN, according to its own figures, 8,000 of the country's 18,500 post offices depend on paying out welfare benefits for more than 40 per cent of their income, it is hard to understand how the government sees the prospect of them losing that business as an "opportunity and not a threat."

Yet, responding to MPs' fears in the Commons that widespread closure of rural post offices would follow, we find Alan Johnson, the minister responsible for the Post Office, painting an idyll of sub-post offices soldiering on in people's homes and garden sheds, with the network safe and sound.

But just how and from where they are to make up for the steep shortfall income in order to survive, Mr Johnson did not specify.

How can he, when the harsh effects of the government's drives to have people's pensions, child benefit and so forth paid into their bank accounts instead of over the counter have already been calculated by his department to threaten the closure of three-quarters of the post offices in East Lancashire? The pattern has already been set in the decimation of the High Street banks branches in smaller towns by the boom in automatic transfers and electronic and telephone banking.

Why should post offices be any less immune from erosion of its physical business?

But why is the government itself actively encouraging this and, yet, pretending no harm will ensue to the post office network - when what is threatened is not just the closure of thousands of small businesses, but the wrecking of a national institution that is a keystone of countless communities and, above all, of rural ones?

The government seem to have no grasp of rural issues as they ignore the fact that the vast majority of village post offices are also village stores. Take away the post office revenue and the business has its feet cut from under it.

It would seem that Labour is both charmed by the economies of automatic transfers and of its high-minded aims for even the poorest to have bank accounts.

But this will do nothing to replace the lost business for post offices or the loss of their vital role in the community, no matter what optimism the minister has.

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