n his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger describes how the New Labour government is destroying one of the the venerable features of "communal decency" in Britain - the local post office. Economies need to be made, though not in the pursuit of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

When I first came to live in Britain, much of ordinary life was premised on a sense of community. It was mostly undeclared; occasionally, it would become vivid, even heroic. Watching Durham miners, defeated but unbowed by hunger and debt, march back to the pit in 1985, led by their women, was a glimpse of Britain at its best. In spite of Thatcher and Blair, that communal decency survives, though you may have to look for it. A good place to look is a local post office.

Local post offices, from the Highlands to the Pennines to the inner cities, are where precious parcels begin their epic journey to the other side of the world, and pensions, income support, child benefit and Incapacity Benefit are drawn, and Freedom Passes are issued, along with Lottery tickets and Mars Bars. I often walk down to my local post office just to browse, watching the kindness that Shailesh and Smita Patel hand out to the elderly, the awkward, the inarticulate, the harried. If an elderly person has failed to turn up on pension day, he or she will get a visit from Smita, with groceries. Smita has been doing this for most of 20 years.

Their post office, in Abbeville Road, Clapham, is one of 169 London branches due to close in May. That is a fifth of all post offices in the capital. Some 2,500 post offices are expected to be shut in Britain by the end of 2009. This includes rural and remote areas, where the post office is quite literally the heart of a community. The Patels in Abbeville Road have had just six weeks to mount a campaign. They have collected 4,500 signatures and packed a local church hall. My neighbours have little doubt about what will happen to "Abbeville Village" if the post office's shutters come down. A proposed betting shop is Lambeth Council's idea of community - or yet another estate agent.

The whole wilful destruction is a new Labour classic and shows why, in a nutshell, even the ever faithful have turned on them. Having already closed 6,000 post offices since it came to power in 1997, more than any other government, it issues press releases saying it wants to "help the Post Office modernise, restore profitability... invest in new products and look at innovative ways to deliver services". We know what this means. It was left to a member of the Scottish Parliament, Fergus Ewing, to say it: "Senior management are preparing the ground for a huge sell-off of the postal service."