Drivers most to blame for danger roads

as both a cyclist and a motorist, I feel I must comment on the cyclophobic outbursts of your correspondents, Messrs Hodgson and Sturdy (Yorkshire Post, May 18 and 31), whose own means of transport is, I suggest, only of the four-wheeled variety.

I do not deny the fact that some cyclists act irresponsibly on our roads, but far fewer I believe than motorists, as their relatively minuscule complicity in traffic-related deaths and injuries demonstrates.

Mr Sturdy condemns cyclists for sometimes encroaching on pavements rather than sticking to roadside cycleways. He ignores the fact that this is, in my experience, usually due to motorists parking on such cycleways, giving the cyclist no other choice if he is to avoid riding out on a stream of speeding Mr Toads in their lethal vehicles.

I suggest that the risk to children cycling to school (to which Mr Sturdy refers) posed by such motorists far exceeds any hazard caused by the example of cyclists forces to mount the pavement.

From: Allan Ramsay, Radcliffe Moor Road, Radcliffe, Manchester.

RATKO Mladic has been described as “a bombastic thug who had no sense of the rules of warfare. If he did, he ignored them”.

What then should we call drivers who have no sense of the rules of road safety? In the 15 years the accused war criminal evaded capture for allegedly ordering the murder of some 20,000 Muslims, more than 45,000 lives have been claimed by motor vehicles on the roads of Britain. On a global time scale, the death toll is more than 20m.

This is civilised? The United Nations have proclaimed road death a global epidemic, and are calling for world leaders to take action. Despite motor vehicles being a potentially lethal weapon, we don’t call road deaths murders, and very rarely are they even manslaughter.

At worst, and it seems only when every road safety rule in the book has been blatantly ignored, might they be called “death by dangerous driving”.

Big business insists on ID

From: John Wilson, Wilsons Solicitors, New Road Side, Horsforth, Leeds.

IN response to Mr Hartford’s letter (Yorkshire Post, May 27), all this insistence nowadays on people producing documentary proof of identity is not entirely the Government’s fault.

Legislation requires that certain businesses have got to try conscientiously to establish that their customers really are who they say they are.

The legislation does not say that this involves any requirement to produce a birth certificate, passport, gas bill, or anything else in particular.

The problem is that big business tends to adopt such requirements unthinkingly to comply with the rules. Then other businesses do the same, which of course just makes the problem worse.

Legally speaking, the identity requirement is a common sense one. Bureaucracy comes from big business not the rules, which are frequently just used as a convenient scapegoat for what is, in reality, a “sod the public” policy.

Our Lords of misrule

From: Philip Smith, New Walk, Beverley, East Yorkshire.

SO former Tory peer Lord Taylor is just facing suspension after being jailed for stealing more than £11,000 from us. Where else but the House of Lords would you only be suspended (if even this happens) rather than what should be happening – permanent expulsion?

As has been said: “Those who break the law shouldn’t be allowed to make (or revise) the law.”

However, this is the House of Lords we are talking about. Here, no matter what you do, it takes an Act of Parliament to remove you. Only the Lower House has the authority to remove someone from the Upper House. How ridiculous this is.

Alongside the expenses scandals themselves this is yet another reason that we can have so little confidence in the largely self-serving hypocrites that attempt to “Lord” it over us. Lords of misrule

Nature scorns climate claims

From: Don Alexander, Knab Road, Sheffield.

HOW right Dai Woosnam is (Yorkshire Post, May 30). Mother Nature, with her volcanos, quakes and tsunamis, can overwhelm our petty “man-made global warming”, fear of which the Government uses to pile on more taxes.

Of course, just to run our bloated Government and bureaucracy needs huge tranches of taxpayers’ and borrowed cash.

To show the Government are not really interested in global warming but only in tax collecting, we need only look at the extra CO2 tax, due in 2013, on Sheffield and Rotherham electric arc furnaces.

David Cameron must realise Britain’s small special steels industry uses recycled, locally arising scrap as its base raw material; two million tons or so, though, for the sake of Government tax purposes, this doesn’t count as recycling.

They must realise that if our furnaces are taxed out of existence, this two million tonnes will probably be shipped via Rotterdam to some unregulated, untaxed plant in the Chinese interior.