Leeds Bradford Airport decision is unjustifiable – Yorkshire Post Letters

IS it complacency, ignorance or arrogance? In March 2019 Leeds City Council declared a climate emergency and committed to making Leeds carbon neutral by 2030. Last week councillors on Leeds City Council’s planning panel voted to approve the expansion of Leeds Bradford airport, ensuring that their commitment will fail, no matter what other action is taken.

Climate change is killing people today but has the potential to kill more than all the pandemics and genocides of history combined.

Although money will only protect us from its worst effects for maybe a generation or so, initially climate change will disproportionately affect the world’s poor, which may explain the councillors’ misplaced complacency. They certainly have no excuse for not knowing the facts, which have been made explicitly clear by a vast body of peer-reviewed research. When elected politicians appear to prefer “alternative facts”, or wilful ignorance, we should be extremely concerned.

Maybe they accept the facts but think that our region is an exceptional case and that others are better placed to pick up the tab on our behalf. Let’s hope that’s been agreed in advance with all concerned, otherwise that view represents arrogance of the highest order. We all think we’re the exception!

Whatever the explanation may be for this shameful decision, we need to ensure it is overturned. The sooner this is done, the sooner we can all focus our energy on finding positive solutions.

From: Gareth Robson, Kent House Road, Beckenham.

I WRITE to express my horror at reports that the feasibility of a rail tunnel between Scotland and Ireland is being assessed.

If true, this is further proof that the Prime Minister is a runaway train. His “garden bridge” and Thames Estuary Airport schemes burned huge amounts of public money even though they never progressed beyond the feasibility stage, but the Prime Minister seems unperturbed as long as there are giant plans with his name on them. Even more worrying is the suggestion that the rail link is being touted as a solution to the administrative problems associated with the Brexit Northern Ireland Protocol.

Meanwhile, the funding stream for infrastructure development in the north of England has been reduced (and much of what is left is apparently to be diverted into, of all things, road-building). There are vague promises from the Prime Minister that HS2 will reach Leeds but, I note, no date.

From: Ken Walsh, Tunstall, Richmond.

I TRY to use Leeds Bradford Airport, and living near Richmond, we head south on the A1(M) and approach via various routes.

We always end up crossing the River Wharfe before tackling the last bottleneck climbing Pool Bank and queueing at the traffic lights controlling the A660 junction – the tailbacks can be horrendous at times.

I am also aghast on seeing the airport traffic being directed via Seacroft and Cross Gates on what is now an inadequate excuse for a ring road. Levelling up is a pipe dream thought up to appease us northern folks.

Campaigner for the North

From: Nadine Peck, Oakworth.

THE interview with Children’s Commissioner Anne Longfield (The Yorkshire Post, February 13) was a very interesting read; as was the editorial comment with its suggestion that, rather than allowing her expertise to go to waste, Downing Street should ask Anne Longfield to spearhead a task force to transform the North’s schools. An excellent idea.

However, I do feel that Anne Longfield, a passionate Yorkshire woman born in the Otley area of Leeds, and now living in the Ilkley area of Bradford, would be an ideal candidate for the position of mayor of West Yorkshire, and that she should be encouraged to put her name forward in the forthcoming mayoral election.

She has long been a vocal campaigner for the children of the North of England, who are after all our future, and her year- long study, leading to the report ‘Growing Up North’ which she published in 2018, has given her a unique insight into issues of northern communities.

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