Friday's Letters: National Park cuts would cause serious hardship

These cuts will directly lead to job losses in the countryside, and indirectly will cause real hardship to small rural businesses as projects and contracts are cancelled and services withdrawn. Fewer UK and overseas visitors will come to the area as a result.

For example, the highly successful, nationally recognised, DalesBus and Moorsbus networks, increasingly seen as a sustainable green tourism alternative to help reduce traffic pollution and congestion in both National Parks, are now seriously under threat and could face major cuts, perhaps even total closure, again reducing the number of visitors to both areas, and support for struggling rural economies at a time of financial downturn and rising fuel costs.

The savings, in national terms, would be trivial but locally the impacts will be devastating.

By all means let's cut bureaucracy but not damage the very mechanisms, including support for rural tourism businesses, that are essential to economic recovery, most especially in our finest protected landscapes.

From: Colin Speakman, Chairman,Yorkshire Dales Society, Grove Road, Ilkley.

Cameron fails wartime history test

From: Andrew Cooper, Kimberley, Nottinghamshire.

SO David Cameron thinks we were the junior partner to the United States in 1940. So much for a public school education.

That year was probably this country's greatest milestone in its history. It was the year we stood alone against the evil of Nazism while our so-called friends across the pond were hell-bent on keeping out of the war.

Mr Cameron is yet another post-war Prime Minister who sucks up to the President of a country that entered the Second World War only when it was attacked by Japan and then ensured we would be in debt to it for decades to come.

We have heard President Barack Obama criticise BP continually over the last few weeks. Does he know why nearly every oil company is drilling in the Gulf of Mexico? It is because his country has the most voracious appetite for cheap fuel.

Obama should remember we pay nearly 5 per gallon at the pumps, but he and more before him and, no doubt, more who follow him will not have the guts to raise prices at the pumps in the US.

He has made it clear that his country has no intention to co-operate with the fight on carbon emissions.

I wonder if Cameron reminded him of Union Carbide or the aftermath of Agent Orange in Vietnam? I doubt it very much. Before Obama criticises BP, he should remember his own country's wretched record on man-made disasters.

From: Brian Sheridan, Redmires Road, Sheffield.

I AGREE with Trevor Mumford who was sickened by David Cameron's recent kowtowing to President Obama (Yorkshire Post, July 28).

As Gordon Brown will testify, there is nothing more damaging to the aspirations of a statesman than a good gaffe. I'm not sure who has been the biggest disappointment to me – the once charismatic US Democrat nominee, my own MP Nick Clegg or the Prime Minister, whose early promise has evaporated following his foolish remarks about Britain as a "junior partner" in the Second World War. Heaven knows, Great Britain is not the force it was, but it is still a great country with a great history and does not deserve to be sold short by its flag bearer.

Nick Clegg's ingenuous reference to "an illegal war"" will have found support among those who have forgotten that he no longer enjoys the freedom of being a loose cannon in opposition, but it was as damaging to his political stature as his not having a clue how much the state pension was.

As for Mr Obama, the once imperious President-elect now cuts a peevish figure who has lost his way and knows it. I am not about to defend BP and its arrogant former boss Tony Hayward but the President's hypocrisy in fanning the flames of oil-spill victims' justified anger to divert attention from his country's problems is as contemptible as it is transparent. He studiously and repeatedly refers to the company as British Petroleum, conveniently forgetting America's history of wreaking environmental havoc and ignoring the fact that BP is almost half American.

Meanwhile, considering some of the mature professionals in the Con-Lib coalition who are making the best of a difficult situation, it is galling that the callow Prime Minister and Deputy PM are where they are.

'Soft target' for savings

From: Helena Pielichaty, Nottinghamshire.

WELL done for highlighting the drastic cuts planned by local

authorities across the region's libraries (Yorkshire Post, July 26).

The library service is indeed a soft target and yet the services libraries provide are crucial to every strata of society.

The unemployed and low paid who can't afford to buy newspapers or books or pay for the internet; the migrant worker wanting to better their English; the student needing somewhere to study, the lonely and vulnerable seeking company in a safe environment; the son looking for large print books, unavailable elsewhere, to take to his avid-reader mother in the care home and the children, wide-eyed with wonder at the amazing titles available to them.

If we lose our libraries and our librarians, we lose our future. It's as plain and simple – and frightening – as that.

From: Kate Taylor, Hon President, Wakefield Historical Society,

Pinder's Grove, Wakefield.

THE likelihood of the increasing erosion of library services (Yorkshire Post, July 26) is disturbing news.

A particular fear for those concerned with our history is the future of the major resources which are held in library local-studies collections or by the county archive services.

These hoards of irreplaceable primary source material are hugely important both to people undertaking any serious research into local history now and to posterity.

The current focus may be on cost-cutting but at the same time we need a positive strategy for the future. This should focus on a continuing policy of collecting, on the cataloguing and conservation of existing documents, on the retention of specialist staff, and on the best means of making material available for study.

This last consideration might be served elsewhere, as it is in

Barnsley, by the bringing together of archive and library services.

The danger is that the present pressures upon our decision-makers may mean a disastrous neglect of what, in the long term, is of paramount significance.

'Desecration' of safe havens for mentally ill

From: Keith Nunn, Burton Street, Farsley, Leeds.

JUDY Gibbard (Yorkshire Post, July 27) makes a strong case for the reinstatement of psychiatric hospitals.

Unfortunately, the horse has already bolted, and many former stables have been closed down or demolished.

Asylum is a very interesting word in England today. We can cope neither with the huge influx of foreign asylum seekers, nor can we house adequately those of our own citizens afflicted with chronic mental health problems. Care in the community has magically appeared.

The Labour government made big noises about rolling out talking therapies. It is as though mental illness can be sorted out with a bit of new-fangled counselling.

The shift away from institutionalised care was unnecessary. It is a lamentable sign of inhospitable times that psychiatric hospitals which used to work so well for many sufferers (acute and chronic) have been replaced with housing estates (High Royds in Menston) or car parks (St James's Roundhay Wing in Leeds).

By a cruel twist of fate, those prisoners who might have been

accommodated in a hospital are housed in the lion's den of prison, with little or no prospect of symptom remission.

The beauty of High Royds, for example, was its spacious grounds, a boon to any distressed mind.

Compared with the inner-city brick surroundings of the much-maligned Becklin Centre in Leeds, it was a peaceful, rural retreat from the helter-skelter tempo of city life. The therapeutic value of such refreshing green spaces was, and is, priceless.

Yes, we may pay a high price for shifting all kinds of care into the community. We may as well abolish the word asylum (safe haven) too.

The closure of psychiatric hospitals will join the desecration of the monasteries in the history books, and England will no longer pretend to provide safe havens for anyone in extremis.

Children are out of control

From: Val Tromans, Matlock, Derbyshire.

I HAVE to agree wholeheartedly with Roger Crossley (Yorkshire Post, July 24) when he says we do not now teach children acceptable behaviour and, sadly, there are examples aplenty.

The other afternoon in Chesterfield town centre, I and several other people watched in amazement as two white stretch limos drove by, loaded with what looked like a whole classful of 11 year-olds, hanging out of all the windows, waving plastic wine glasses and shrieking at passers-by like banshees.

No adults in evidence except the drivers, who had no control over the children and probably very little over their vehicles with the mayhem that was going on behind them.

Is this what now passes for a junior school leaving party, I wonder?

New home in wrong place

From: ME Wright, Grove Road, Harrogate.

"DISGRACED banker Sir Fred Goodwin... has bought a new high-security Edinburgh property worth 3.5m" (Yorkshire Post, July 27).

If only that were a euphemistic way of telling us that he's been heavily fined to pay for his board and lodging in Saughton Prison for a few years.

Ins and outs of EU membership

From: Edwin Bateman, Penrith, Cumbria.

DAVID Cameron said, "Turkey should be allowed to join the EU" on his trade trip to Turkey. Comment: Turkey should be allowed to join on condition that Britain is allowed to leave. We could then save the 6bn plus that the EU now costs us every year and prevent the thousands, perhaps millions, of Turkish people coming here.

A question of civil liberties

From: M Davies, Sherburn in Elmet.

HURRAH for Bill Carmichael (Yorkshire Post, July 23). I hope he doesn't find the police feeling his collar in this biased world.

As a Yorkshire-born white Christian, I have always worked and am happy to live in a multicultural society, as long as we have a level playing field. Which at the moment we patently do not. When is someone in authority going to consider the civil liberties of people like me?