In exchange for the ever-increasing local council taxes mandated by Labour, one now also increasingly expects being charged extra for rubbish collection (assuming it is collected), not to be permitted to drive on a public road much faster than you can walk, see your long-time local hospital closed, and even have police arrive at an auto accident scene in which a car had come off the road onto your property, crashing through a wall, only to be told by responding officers that since the accident had not taken place on “a public highway” there was nothing for them to investigate. (That latter was related to us by someone we know.)

Also, one probably won’t have a post office nearby. Not far from where we used to live, we see how the Labour fightback continues, according to the local Enfield Independent . . .

SIX post offices will be closed in Enfield, it has been announced.

Post Office Ltd swung the axe yesterday on 155 post offices across London with the closures coming into effect as early as next month.

The branches affected in the borough are at Chase Side, Enfield; Freezywater, in Hertford Road, Enfield; Green Street, Enfield; Clock House Parade, Palmers Green; Town Road, Edmonton and Crescent West, Hadley Wood…

. . . through the closings of most of the local, convenient post offices (including the one on Chase Side, which is an excellent, small operation, where you actually get seen with a smile within a few minutes of when you join the occasional queue for the one, or maybe two, clerks), in order to jam everyone sullenly into the one in Enfield Town (which for some time has already doubled as a third-rate supermarket, and where you wait sometimes at least 30 minutes to see a snarling, under-trained clerk, even though there are usually at least half a dozen of them).

And thus we see there yet another demonstration as how Labour remain determined to get themselves voted out of office at the next general election.

People here are used to their post offices being government “front doors” for all sorts of services besides merely mailing letters. If you want to turn the post office into U.S.-style operations which deal almost entirely in “mail”, then do so and tell everyone that’s what you want and need to do. But silly half-measures where you kinda aim to do one thing, but not entirely, closing some, but not others, claiming the service must make money, but then make it difficult for it to engage in the competitive reforms it must in order to do so, just gets people (especially older people) confused and annoyed.

But it’s good that Mr Brown is taking on the Burmese junta. Calling them “inhuman“? One can only imagine them quaking in their jackboots.