If the past few months have taught us anything, it surely must be that any involvement of the private sector in essential services means that shareholders pocket the profits and the taxpayer bales them out when corruption, greed or sheer incompetence take them to the brink of destruction.

As essential services (banks, transport, health, communications, and utilities) cannot go bust without taking the whole country with them, no government can allow that to happen. So they have to pour our money in to stop their collapse.

This observation should be enough to discredit all policies of privatisation of public services once and for all.

Enter the unelected and equally discredited Lord Mandelson, who announces the Government’s intention to sell part of Royal Mail to a foreign investor.

On whose yacht was this brilliant plan conceived? The posties in Oxford have been saying for years that Royal Mail was not being modernised but run into the ground to make it unviable before being privatised.

They claimed the closure of the Cowley Mail Centre was part of that plan, as it made no economic or logical sense.

They have sacrificed their salaries with strikes to alert us to the danger, and it looks like they have been proved right in everything they said.

Their jobs and our service are inextricably linked, and the Labour Party seems set to sell out both.

I was present when, in September 2007, Andrew Smith MP declared he opposed the privatisation of Royal Mail.

And, on these pages, he vowed to fight to stop the Mail Centre’s proposed closure.

What are you going to do this time, Mr Smith?

DONA VELLUTI, Southfield Park, Oxford