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You can't run ambulances like a delivery round
From: Arthur Boynton, St Wilfrids Court, Brayton Selby, North Yorkshire. REGARDING your article on the failure of the Ambulance Service to deliver an efficient outpatient service for its clients (Yorkshire Post, July 21), I am a retired ambulance worker who progressed from ambulance driver to senior paramedic training officer during my 32 years of service and so I hope that I can claim to know my subject.
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.Many reasons to put Brown in firing line
From: David Wright, Little Lane, Easingwold, North Yorkshire.
NO, Ken Dransfield (Yorkshire Post, July 12), we have every right and reason to criticise our failing and ineffective Prime Minister who is clearly not up to the job along with many of his parliamentary colleagues of all political persuasions.
The morale of our people is already undermined by the ineptitude of this Labour administration and their inability to control the problems facing the UK at home and abroad, hence the now daily cynicism and apathy expressed by the people who do not trust or believe the constant empty promises and useless knee-jerk policies.
The latest non-event is Gordon Brown's promise to halt the current knife and gun crime by getting the criminals to come face to face with their victims!
What is needed are meaningful deterrents, more police on the streets, proper sentencing and an end to the over-abused human rights legislation whereby lawyers have a licence to make money defending criminals and failed asylum seekers who should have been either given immediate jail sentence for the full period they have been given or deported immediately from the UK.
Coupled with this serious situation, we have an economy which is broke, for we are clearly spending far more than we produce and yet this Government spends, spends and spends on yet more legislation and hare-brained schemes employing even more pen-pushers and lawyers.
From: Diana Priestley, Fixby Road, Huddersfield.
GORDON Brown as Heathcliff? At first glance it seemed like
a joke.
Then think, Heathcliff ruined the Earnshaws financially, made the lives of the Lintons, a perfectly harmless, if naive family, a misery and tried to reduce the hapless Hareton to a buffoon dependent on himself.
The happy ending of the story only comes about when he is dead and gone and the next generation are able, without fear, to think for themselves.
Ah – now I see the resemblance!
Changes of attitude
From: Robert Carlton, Illingworth, Halifax.
I'M a bit hesitant to criticise this Labour Government. I want to voice my discontent but something always holds me back.
Could it be they just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time? A time when far too many people have little or no respect for authority of any kind.
A time when contributing to the well-being of the country is put second to their own financial gain.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news but unless people's attitudes change things are not going to get better. Therefore, I am appealing to those who have a conscience to change their ways.
And I fear this is an apt way to end this letter by using the words of John F Kennedy when he quoted: "Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country."
Cremation pollution
From: William B Thompson, Harrogate.
IT has been reported that followers of certain faiths have been granted the right to open air cremations. In fact, at least one has already taken place clearly using timber as a fuel.
I do wonder why we bother with The Clean Air Act which was conceived to reduce the amount of atmospheric pollution. The burning of timber containing preservatives (which most old timber does) and the necessary accelerants will only serve to increase this pollution.
The environmental authorities of our country will stop anyone causing a nuisance or polluting the atmosphere with smoke. Will outdoor cremations not give rise to the accusation, "One law for us and one for them"?
In Harrogate, the council has spent in excess of 1m installing environmental filters to the crematorium specifically to remove noxious materials given out by the cremation process. Are we now to believe this has been a waste of time and money?
Lib-Dem contradiction
From: Tim Hunter, Farfield Avenue, Knaresborough.
SO the pro-European Liberal Democrats now claim to be able to deliver tax cuts? Pigs might fly.
If they are serious about cutting tax and waste, why are the Liberal Democrats so supportive of the EU?
For the last 12 years the EU's accounts have not been signed off because 40 per cent of the EU budget cannot be accounted for at all.
The UK is one of the biggest contributors to the EU, but we get less back per capita than any EU country.
The Liberal Democrats, by refusing to support a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, have effectively surrendered more control over our financial affairs to the EU.
In the future we will have less scope for reducing tax. In particular, we will be powerless to stop immigration and the burden that puts on public finances.
The new treaty has no provisions to sort out the EU's chronic problems with fraud and waste. According to its own figures, the EU loses 1m every working day to fraud.
Political territory
From: Arthur Quarmby, Holme, Holmfirth.
TIMOTHY Kirkhope MEP claims great authority and support as "the only truly regionally elected representative" of Yorkshire and the Humber.
I must say I have no recollection of voting for
him, but that aside, I really wonder just how much enthusiastic support he gets from the second half of his constituency?
I am really very tired of this ridiculous phrase "Yorkshire and the Humber". Have you ever heard of London and the Thames, or Lancashire and the Mersey? No.
What does it mean? Does it mean anything at all, or is it a sort of bureaucratic folk-memory of a bad dream which Barbara Castle had
when the Humber Bridge was built?
I for one would be prepared to support Mr Kirkhope if he would refer instead to Yorkshire and its Ridings.
The sound of a fiddle
From: Simon Wood, Brockfield Hall, York.
THE church at Great Ponton, on the A1 in Leicestershire, has on its steeple a fiddle. This was put there by the builder as a lasting complaint that he had been fiddled out of fair payment for his work.
I am reminded of this by news that our profligate Government is preparing to fiddle the books on fiscal policy, and allow borrowing to balloon, in a final admission of the straits that its fiscal imprudence has got us into (Yorkshire Post, July 19).
Perhaps now the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square should be the site of a sculpture of a giant fiddle.
This would be a reminder and a dire warning of how incompetent governments can fiddle the books while they mess up a hitherto fine economy.
Life in the real world
From: Mrs JG Jude, The Grove, Idle, Bradford, West Yorkshire.
IT would seem that after being elected into parliament you obtain cloth ears, because nobody in Westminster listens to the electorate.
As for closing post offices (perhaps the only shop in
the area) you are depriving people of a facility. Therefore, a car or bus must be used to go the post office in town or bank. How's that for reducing road traffic?
I think it is time that the powers-that-be came out of cuckoo land and into the real world.
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Saturday 11 February 2012
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