SIR – I read with interest about the fantastic efforts to save St Ippolyts and Whitwell Post Offices. Your readers should be made aware that there is a Postal Services Directive making its way through the EU legislative process at present that seeks to

SIR - I read with interest about the fantastic efforts to save St Ippolyts and Whitwell Post Offices.

Your readers should be made aware that there is a 'Postal Services Directive' making its way through the EU legislative process at present that seeks to commercialise postal services. Lib Dem, Labour and Tory MEPs have all voted for it. The Directive will lead to more and more post office closures because it prevents governments subsidising any that are a public service but not making much money.

Green Party Euro-MPs have voted against this deeply troubling Directive.

It is unfortunate, to say the least, that the other parties, though locally they say they are against post office closures, have national and international policies that point in precisely the opposite direction. It is MPs and MEPs from the three old parties who are taking the very actions that are making post office closures in Britain more commonplace.

There also looms the spectre of a privatised Royal Mail. In the long term this would spell the end of Britain's public postal service, in favour of a cut-throat market in which local post offices would continue to go to the wall, as would the crucial benchmark (for having a genuinely public postal service) of one price for a stamp for a letter to anywhere in Britain.

The only party which can be trusted not to close local post offices is the Green Party because we actually believe in local services. .

RUPERT READ

Green Party candidate for

Eastern region in 2009

Euro-election

Norwich