This East Coast Main Line ticket farce exposes rail’s failings – Yorkshire Post Letters

I WISH our representatives every success in their attempts to get the Government to deliver our rail links (The Yorkshire Post, October 29), but sadly have low expectations.

Rishi Sunak’s Northern Powerhouse Rail hypocrisy – The Yorkshire Post says

The clues are in the Government statements you printed in bold type within the report, setting out official responses to HMG’s own ‘Integrated Rail Plan’ (IRP). The responses are littered with vague phrases, including ‘long-term’, ‘no definitive date’ (for publication), ‘anticipated to arrive in the next few weeks’, ‘will soon outline’ and ‘absolutely committed’ – how many times have we heard that?

Budget 2021: Northern Powerhouse Rail and HS2 betrayal fears grow – Tom Richmond

The key statement with regard to action, as any teacher, accountant or other professional working to deadlines will tell you, is the lack of a ‘definitive date’, without which decisions drift.

Delays linked to the Government via the nationalised East Coast Main Line provoked this letter. I am frustratingly still unable to book return tickets to visit family in Aberdeen because, less than two months from the year-end, there is still no 2022 East Coast rail timetable available, almost certainly due to the lack of yet another ‘definitive date’.

From: ME Wright, Harrogate.

RISHI Sunak’s Budget has certainly levelled-up the rhetoric somewhat. With tongue in cheek, Gordon Lawrence refers to the planting of money trees along the M62 (The Yorkshire Post, October 30).

For decades, we have told that this sort of generous greenery cannot thrive beyond London and the Home Counties. So what about tackling the Cayman Islands and all the other tax-dodgers’ British idylls?

From: Hilary Andrews, Nursery Lane, Leeds.

TRIPLE lock on our pensions removed, no free TV licence after 75, free prescription age raised, no mention in the Chancellor’s free spending Budget. After keeping the economy afloat with our taxes in our working years, we have now become the disposable generation.

From: DS Boyes, Upper Rodley Lane, Leeds.

WELL, hasn’t Rishi Sunak beaten Labour at their own game? By a ‘hat trick’ of taxes frozen or cut, public sector pay rises and more public spending, all Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves could do was carp on about the ‘wealthy’ sipping Champagne. Perhaps she needs to remember the old adage of “those in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones?”

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