You cannot run an ambulance service in the same way as a supermarket delivery round. By its very nature, its clients can change from day to day and the areas in which they live change in the same way, making it very difficult for the planners to keep pace with the changes.

It is, therefore, essential to make sure that the staff who control the ambulance journey times know the area in which they work and the difficulties the road staff have to keep to strict timetables.

Ideally, the control personnel should have worked on the road and so gained first-hand experience of the problems to be encountered.

The hospital authorities could help by checking the appointment times and where the patients live so that there is a realistic chance of patients from the same area and the same appointment times being transported together, rather than as happened before when two patients were booked for the same clinic at the same time who lived 15 miles apart.

I am also saddened by the slavish attention to response times by the currentauthorities for accident and emergency patients being seen to within eight minutes.

Do these people not travel on our congested roads and realise that to get to incidents even within a city, it is unrealistic to expect the ambulance staff to risk causing an accident to attain this elusive timescale?

As for the staff who work in the Dales and have to travel miles to get to the patient, even the boffins should begin to appreciate the futility of setting targets of eight minutes.


Children must learn to take on challenges


From: Jill Steel, Riversdale Road, Hull.

WELL, well, no sooner do my fingers ready themselves to type out a pithy comment or two about the risks of sack and three-legged races at Beamish Open Air Museum, my whole being thrumming with ire at the wimpishness of officials, than you carry the cheering report about Queen Mary's School at Topcliffe (Yorkshire Post, July 17).

What a sensible man is the head, Robert McKenzie Johnston, a man after my own heart. Of course, we all have to take risks, to fail or succeed, and the result is a deeper understanding of what we can or can't do. How can you keep telling children that something is "dangerous"? Why are you not explaining to them how to deal with it? Why is this negative attitude so prevalent?

Skills for coping should be among the first things children are taught – and it must be in real situations. Surely Mr McKenzie Johnston is not the only person recognising this fact? Confidence should be built from the beginning so that children are not afraid to tackle new experiences and opportunities. It's not difficult.


Dogmatic assertions that promote multi-culturalism


From: D Harrop, Malton Street, Sheffield.

A RECENT article by Jeni Harvey (Yorkshire Post, July 4) headed "Racist shame of pupils revealed after 7/7" reported the findings of a MORI poll, published by an education charity, DEA.

MORI tested the tolerance of pupils in 82 state schools towards "those from different backgrounds", living in this country, and found that a significant percentage, albeit a minority – of "white" – for which read English – pupils felt that it was not a good idea to have people "from different backgrounds" living here. May I ask, in the absence of defined terms: wherein lies this racism?

The terms racism and racist, which are part of the vocabulary of those who promote a multi-culturalist agenda, may be usefully defined in terms of the way in which they are used. They are frequently used, with derogatory intent, as labels to stick on those perceived as politically unsympathetic.

In this particular case, it is, irresponsibly, thought useful to castigate as "racist" those young schoolchildren who manifestly do not accept the imposition of a contrived multi-cultural Britishness. To impute "racism" is to impute guilt, it is the attempt to shut down debate, to attempt to impose boundaries on what can legitimately be discussed, the last stage before full-blown thought control. Because that is what is at stake. This society is on the way to becoming a society which Winston Smith, the central figure of George Orwell's 1984, might have recognised.

The uncritical acceptance of the fundamentals of multi-culturalism is assiduously promoted, and school pupils are the most appropriate, that is vulnerable candidates to receive this form of social engineering. Resistance to this process, whether or not fully articulated, shows pupils exercising their critical faculties and is, in my view, to be applauded. The imputation of "racism" is, in my view, a vulgar slur.

It is not difficult to understand that the multi-culturalist agenda does not consist of a set of moral principles, to be subscribed to and practised. Rather it consists of a set of dogmatic assertions which, when unpicked, are seen to describe a body of long-term politico-economic objectives with global aspirations.