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Postal Services Bill

I have no problem doing that. I do not know whether the hon. Gentleman has been in the House when I have spoken about the Post Office in the past. I am the organiser and secretary of the communications workers liaison group in this place. I have opposed every attempt by any Government to bring in schemes to downsize the post office network—every single one of them. My Government was criticised by me and by the Communication Workers Union. That Government put in a director, Crozier, who walked off with millions of pounds in bonuses for sacking people—for downsizing the number of people at the sharp end and failing entirely to do the one thing that he was tasked to do, which was to bring in the technology to modernise the process of distribution and introduce letter-bundling by street, as is done in any sensible country. He failed and was paid millions of pounds. That sounds like what happened with the banks so it seems as though we did a lot of that under the previous Government. I am happy to say that the Labour Government got it wrong, because they did get it wrong. I say to the hon. Member for Colchester (Bob Russell) that his party will be judged on how it acts in government, not on how he is acting from the liberal wing of the Liberal Democrats. The orange book Liberals have joined the Tories and will become Tories if they want to stand at the next election. They are sitting opposite me at this moment. They are the people who are destroying the post office network, just as the delusional people in my party cost us millions of votes by doing what is about to be carried to its final conclusion—that is, attacking the structure of our communities. When a Crown office goes and a sub-post office is put into a sweet shop at the end of the high street, we see the change. We see people queuing outside in the rain because the shop is too small to handle the business. When a sub-post office is put into the back of a small supermarket, as one has in Bathgate, or into a sweet shop, as one has in Linlithgow in my constituency, people in wheelchairs cannot get into the post office when staff create a barrier as they stock the shelves with quick-sale goods. All that happened under our Government, and the measures proposed in the Bill will be worse than any of that.