A fine attempt to mind your language

I WRITE in relation to the decision by Barnsley Council to introduce an £80 fixed penalty to people swearing in the town centre. It is claimed that bad language is putting off shoppers in the town (Yorkshire Post, June 1).

One hopes that the council will give prior indication of what is not acceptable but do not ban local customary words such as “wazak” (that’s the ponglish – a mixture of polish and english – spelling).

The local shopkeepers are displaying notices to promote the campaign for good langauge. The notices read “No effing and jeffing”. Isn’t that the use of bad language in itself? What the heck is “jeffing”?

Sadly, the problem of bad language is not restricted to Barnsley town centre It is part of modern society throughout the land.

Many young comedians (I use that word loosely) are unable to resist bad language in their acts – you never heard Charlie Williams swearing on stage.

Many older people look back at the good old days (now that was a show in which swearing never occured) and wonder where the norms of those days disappeared to. Whatever happened to ricketts, whooping cough and diptheria? Who can forget Tony Capstick’s recording hit many years ago? The idea is not to look back but forward. How will a fixed penalty notice stop the problem? Perhaps one way forward is to offer offenders the opportunity to attend “awareness” classes such as those offered to speeding motorists.

The folks of Barnsley are resourceful people and will, I’m sure, come up with a strategy to avoid being fined.

I wish the Burghers of Barnsley all the best in trying to clean up the language of the local populace. If it works, then the idea may spread to other areas, but I will not be holding my breath.

Climate for business

From: D Wood, Thorntree Lane, Goole.

I WOULD like to congratulate David Merlin-Jones on this excellent article (Yorkshire Post, May 31). This was a very perceptive article for such a young man to write.

The sad fact of the matter is that the professional politicians who make the policies that affect our manufacturing industries like Chris Huhne don’t have a clue about the manufacturing industries and electric power.

Mr Huhne is a fanatical supporter of wind farms, the hugely costly and grossly inefficient green source of putting our power supply in jeopardy.

If his latest plans for reducing CO2 are applied, he will single-handedly destroy British manufacturing and leave us all sat in the cold and dark.

His plans will cost us £70bn and 600,000 jobs; a good enough reason for David Cameron to remove him.

Our professional politicians need to face up to the facts that they actually know very little about what goes on in manufacturing and power generation and should start listening to the people who do, engineers and scientists, but not the ones who make their living providing dubious figures on climate change.

I do acknowledge that our climate is changing, but destroying our manufacturing industries and power supply will do no one any good. The answer to green energy is below the waves, in the tide.

We must fight for the NHS

From: George Appleby, Clifton, York.

THE poorer and more destitute people are, the more they need our National Health Service (Yorkshire Post, June 9). The richer a nd wealthier they are, the less they need it and the more they resent contributing to the cost of providing it.

Our National Health Service is a direct measure of the strength of our democracy. We actively promote democracy for less developed nations around the world, so that they can achieve what our democratic system has brought us. 3

We must fight with equal determination to promote and protect our National Health Service our parents and their parents worked, fought and died to win for us, to be protected for our children and theirs.

Not a transformed money machine for those who can do very well without our National Health Service, no matter how much they profess to love it.

It’s boring, but it’s true

From: JD Billcliffe, Wellin Lane, Edwalton, Nottingham.

ONE sympathises with Don Burslam (Yorkshire Post, June 7) being bored by Eurosceptics “banging on” about a referendum.

Similarly, one sympathises with all those who had to suffer William Wilberforce banging on about the slave trade which everyone accepted as legitimate and in Britain’s best commercial interests.

Then there were those dreadful suffragettes boring everybody with their “Votes for Women” when all right-minded people knew that their husbands and fathers were quite capable of making their political decisions for them.

What about Churchill in the 1930s boring everybody with his dire prognostications of the Nazi threat? We all knew that Hitler had no further territorial ambitions and wanted nothing but peace in Europe

If the Eurosceptics bore you Mr Burslam – tough! There are many topics which people keep peddling (a list is available on request) driving me to distractions but I would never deny anyone the right to “bang on” about them ad nauseam.

It’s all to do with democracy and freedom of speech.