This week Tony Blair told rural Britain 'you never had it so good'. Country dwellers, faced with high housing costs, a lack of well-paid work, little public transport and the farming crisis, were unconvinced.

At least the Prime Minister has acknowledged one of the most pressing problems afflicting rural areas: the alarming demise of sub-post offices. He is right to be worried. The devastating impact a post office closure has on its community has been brought home by our Counter Attack campaign.

Since its launch a few days ago, hundreds of readers have contacted us. Most of them have stressed that the post office is the lifeblood of their village.

Often the pub and the shop have already gone under and it is the one remaining business for miles around. In too many cases, the post office has been lost too. When the Government announced plans to pay benefits directly into claimants' bank accounts, rather than over the counter, it sounded the death knell for many more.

Surprised by the subsequent outcry, ministers have backtracked. They have pledged that anyone who wishes to collect their pension or child allowance from the post office will be allowed to go on doing so.

And today Mr Blair has come up with a new scheme to save post offices. They will be fitted with cash machines.

This is a typically Blairite scheme. It is a headline-grabbing solution that sees modern technology as a panacea. But the proposal does not stand up to scrutiny.

What post offices need are more over-the-counter transactions. Cash machines will discourage this trade.

Claimants are more likely to ask for benefits to be paid into their bank accounts if they have a hole-in-the-wall handy.

It will be useful for villagers to have access to a cash machine, certainly. But to suggest this is the solution to the post office crisis is a nonsense. The real answer is for Mr Blair's Government to protect the post offices' core business.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.