Don’t let Leeds Bradford Airport luddites halt expansion – Yorkshire Post Letters

CONGRATULATIONS are due to Leeds Council planning committee for having the courage and foresight to grant planning permission for the expansion of our local airport.

The people of Yorkshire, and the businesses of Yorkshire, deserve to have a major airport in their own county without having to trudge over the Pennines to Manchester, or worse still, having to drive down to Heathrow, a journey which fills me with horror.

I would be interested to know how many of the objectors living in our county use Leeds Bradford Airport for their holidays, or do they, on a point of principle, travel hundreds of miles to bigger airports, gaily polluting the countryside as they do so with the fumes and other nasties from their car exhausts.

Perhaps, like the Luddites before them, they are opposed to any economic progress and any improvement in the human condition. Let’s get building as soon as possible.

From: Michael Green, Baghill Green, Tingley.

TRUSTEES of pension funds, in both the public and the private sector, are under a legal obligation to invest their available funds to obtain the best possible returns for their members.

So let us be quite clear that when Friends of the Earth say that councils should not be investing their pension funds in fossil fuels, and instead use them to support local investment priorities (The Yorkshire Post, February 23), they are actually asking the pension fund trustees to break the law.

If Friends Of The Earth are serious, they should be lobbying Parliament to change the law so that pension fund trustees can invest according to the current environmental fashion rather than for the best returns.

And, whether they do that or not, they should be prepared to re-christen themselves as “Friends of the Earth but enemies Of pensioners”. It’s easy to occupy the high moral ground when it’s other people’s money.

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