Perplexed by MP’s claims of the Government’s achievements

From: Luke Farley, Windsor Close, Kippax, Leeds.

AFTER reading Alec Shelbrooke’s puff piece celebrating the achievements of the Conservative Party (Yorkshire Post, September 30), I was left somewhat perplexed and found myself asking if the man has any grip on reality?

While I recognise that the piece was “red meat” for his core voters, I was surprised that an article so laden with half-truths would be allowed to unquestionably go to print.

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The claim that the Tories have helped create 1.4 million jobs in the private sector doesn’t mention the amount of these jobs that are a) part-time; b) based on zero-hours contracts; c) self-employment; and d) roles which would have been in the public sector had the Tories not continued their crusade to outsource the UK.

The £600 tax cut for working people fails to take into account the fact that net household incomes have decreased in real terms over the past three years and standards of living have declined due to the cost of living crisis caused by this wrong-headed government.

He also fails to mention the decline in the numbers of nurses throughout the country and the widespread opposition to NHS reforms both from the public and medical professionals; opposition that led to 50,000 people, many of whom were doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals, to protest on the streets of Manchester on Sunday.

Surely I cannot have been the only person to see the irony in Mr Shelbrooke, who represents former mining communities in Elmet and Rothwell, talking about “hard-working people” in the 1980s receiving little reward, especially given the historical significance of Conservative policy throughout the 80s in relation to those hard-working people who worked in the coal industry.

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The idea of the Conservative Party being “united on the question of Europe” is not only laughable, but demonstrably untrue. David Cameron has been forced into promising a referendum not because of his love of democracy, but because of his Eurosceptic backbenchers.

From: Brian Hardgrave, Church Street, Kilham, Driffield.

I WAS somewhat mystified by the article by Liam Fox (Yorkshire Post, October 1).

With such a shortage of 
medical practitioners, 
surely it would have been 
more in the national interest 
for him to have returned 
to the field which he was 
trained for, rather than 
indulge in such writing from 
the comfort of the 
backbenches?

After all, his university 
training in those days would 
have been at the expense 
of the taxpayer, and it 
would show a more 
practical form of virtue 
were he to return to 
his original ambition of 
helping the sick.