Our MPs should become posties for a week and see how they tolerate the job. Let's see now, about £250 take home each week is about the same as an MP's personal expenses for a few days.

Just imagine the likes of Cameron and Brown and even Royal Mail boss Adam Crozier (on £1 million a year) pounding the streets laden with a sack even heavier than their state-funded pensions - no, I couldn't envisage that either.

All the posties want, and the UK desperately needs, is an efficient Royal Mail that treats its workforce with the respect they deserve and awards them a good pension when they retire.

UK business needs the Royal Mail and its relatively cheap and efficient delivery service, without which many can't survive. Post office branches cover the entire country so business and consumers can post and receive parcels, many now increasingly ordered online 24/7.

Gordon Brown often congratulates the small business network. Well Mr Brown, put your money where your mouth is and pay the Royal Mail staff decent wages and pensions.

Rather than sacking 40,000 Royal Mail employees, utilise them instead in the development of a Royal Mail fit for the 21st century, and able to offer UK business the 24/7 collection and delivery service it deserves.

Gordon Brown and New Labour need to rely on copycat Tory policies for cheap populism, and as the paymasters of Royal Mail are simply failing to deliver.

T Scaife, Manor Drive, York.

  • I would like to ask one of the present strikers supposedly working for the Royal Mail just what they hope to achieve by putting their employers out of business, through taking away any hopes of being competitive in this highly vulnerable line of work.

I am sick of so-called key workers, and presumably Royal Mail employees can be called that, striking and causing immense hardship to the general public as well as the people who have given them a job.

Clearly, any contract signed by these troublemakers is not worth the paper it was printed on.

If they feel they have any grievance, they simply down tools, and to hang with those who suffer. Whatever job a person is offered, the salary, terms and conditions are spelled out at the time and should be accepted, or other employment sought.

Why is there no loyalty to employers nowadays? The phrase "if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen" springs to mind.

I think that if the Royal Mail goes under, or suffers in any way directly through the irresponsible attitude and action of their employees, those should be sacked without any form of financial recompense or hope of a reference.

So many people, commercial and private, are suffering through this strike that I truly feel the Royal Mail should take the bull by the horns and state in no uncertain terms that the jobs of strikers are on the line and will be lost if further walk-outs are contemplated.

To me, they are beneath contempt, and I believe that many of their number are fed up of losing money and putting their jobs and the whole postal service in jeopardy.

Is flexibility such a dirty word if it means being competitive in this cut-throat business?

Heather Causnett, Escrick Park Gardens, Escrick, York.