Political failure over education and costly vanity projects

IT was gratifying to read the letter from Dr David Hill about “Science City” (Yorkshire Post, March 1).

He amplifies in great depth and clarity the obvious strategy of necessary implementation “to provide our greatest strength to flourish” but sadly his letter is flawed because he omits to include a strategy of producing the quality of people to support his ideology, an obvious core requirement.

I have had considerable experience of attempting to train young people, provided by a miscellany of “labour exchanges” the majority of whom will attend for one day only, the rare exception three days, before returning back to their leisurely employment benefits.

Most of the attendees had difficulty in even reading a tape measure necessary to machine a component, their inability to read simple instructions and carry out simple arithmetic, a not unusual finding. I wonder why? The answer is obvious. Our education system is badly failing and still deteriorating which has systematically been pointed out in your Letters to the Editor over the years. Without properly trained and disciplined personnel, the ideology expressed by Dr Hill in his letter will never come to fruition. People of the right calibre are an obvious prerequisite to any programme of future industrial innovation.

I doubt whether our politicians are able to comprehend such obvious forward thinking highlighted in Dr Hill’s letter.

From: James Anthony Bulmer, Peel Street, Horbury, Wakefield.

ONE has to wonder how much more of a borrowed mess, the Blair/New Labour Government left the country in, especially as it has infected Labour strongholds in the North, mainly in Yorkshire.

A county I was once proud to be a member of but not any more. Not when I see, hear and read about our cities and the complete and utter waste of money Labour-led councils have been spending on the so-called regeneration projects. You reported the closure of the Leeds casino and restaurants (Yorkshire Post, March 5). Leeds was one of eight cities chosen by the Labour government for a major casino five years ago.

Did the then government leave the money to pay for this possible white elephant, or even the redundancy money for the 99 lost jobs? And the councils still cry out for government money for flood defences.

Sheffield recently announced the closure and possible demolition of the Don Valley Stadium, built in 1990. This has been costing £700,000 from the public purse per year and needed £1.6m to modernise and still wasn’t paid for. We have in Wakefield an art (?) gallery costing more than £30m, yet we have a local Labour MP, Ed Balls visiting the elderly in Wakefield, and finding that the majority of them are finding it hard to make ends meet.

As the next council elections are near, we can only live in the hope that Noah puts his name forward. He at least, thought of the species and not the bright shining bangles and beads. I will vote for him, even though I have built my own ark.