March 21 letters: Post manifesto for region wins fans across political divide

AS a born and bred Yorkshireman, and the Conservative candidate for Leeds North East at the General Election, I welcome the Yorkshire Manifesto you published (The Yorkshire Post, March 17).

I am proud that the Conservative-led government’s policies have helped to deliver a vastly improved economic outlook in Yorkshire. Yet there is still more to be done, which is why it is so vital to elect a Conservative government, so we can continue to deliver the improvements needed.

The vision, determination and leadership shown by people such as Gary Verity has demonstrated just what we can achieve.

From: Andrew Brown, Green Party prospective candidate for Skipton and Ripon.

IT was great to read the section on housing and planning in your Yorkshire Manifesto. With 8,000 affordable homes being built against a need of 30,000, your argument for legislation and financial incentives for affordable homes makes huge sense as does your insistence that local authorities need the power to ensure housing growth does not come at the cost of the green belt or countryside land.

You clearly, and I believe correctly, say that the recently introduced National Planning Policy Framework has vastly strengthened the hand of developers and we need incentives to encourage
them to build on brownfield sites.

From: Louis Kasatkin (JSA Recipient), Pinderfields Road, Wakefield.

IT is galling to discover that the very elected representatives you had hoped would actually represent your interests turn out to do the exact opposite.

Ms Rachel Reeves MP, who possibly might become Secretary of State at the DWP after May 7, has stated categorically that Labour don’t represent, nor do they want to represent, the very many millions of British citizens currently in receipt of benefits.

Her statement as an affront to democratic politics, a gross insult to and vilification of benefits recipients or even a wholesale betrayal of fundamental Labour principles, would on reflection be a very moderate response.

Metropolitan-domiciled, Oxbridge-educated elitist, party apparatchiks parachuted into staunch working class “safe” Northern constituencies have long since been the Labour Party norm. All have that same loathing and outright contempt for the victims of their policies from 1997-2010.