Wind turbines would ruin the landscape

I WOULD like to draw your readers’ attention to a very informative website (www.savethedales.co.uk) which gives details of proposals to build wind turbines on land stretching from Norwood to Beckwithshaw, near Harrogate.

Three wind farms are proposed providing a total of 36 turbines, up to 410ft in height. This is almost two and a half times the height of Nelson’s Column. The impact on the landscape of the Harrogate area, the Nidderdale Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and parts of the Yorkshire Dales would be devastating.

Eight turbines have already been built and a planning application for seven more bigger ones is now with Harrogate Borough Council.

If this is approved I have no doubt that applications for the remaining 21 (bigger still) will quickly follow.

There are very many reasons why these environmentally devastating proposals should be stopped in their tracks and I hope the Harrogate councillors who will soon be considering the proposals will do just this. To grant planning approval would be little short of idiocy.

From: Ron Firth, Woodgarth Court, Campsall, Doncaster.

THE propaganda opportunity afforded to Phil Dyke, wind farm developer for Banks Renewables, is the second occasion in recent months that you have given free rein to his views.

That he has had a measure of success in ruining landscapes and seriously reducing our prime agricultural green belt land is not down to the power of his message and the lack of opposition to these follies.

There are very many individuals forming groups to leaflet, at their own expense, local communities, mainly rural, giving them the facts about wind farms and, in many instances, gaining support from local councillors and occasionally local MPs who are genuinely concerned at the lasting damage threatening their way of life and energy supply.

Unfortunately, Mr Dyke holds the trump card in the form of the Planning Inspector, appointed by the previous government with the tacit agreement of Parliament, who can be wheeled out to overrule any refusal by planning officers and councillors as long as Mr Dyke and other developers go through the farce of holding consultations locally and are prepared to be Aunt Sallies for a couple of evenings.

So much for the pledge of giving local people more say in planning applications affecting their locality.

Why did Tories let Maggie go?

From: Richard Billups, East Avenue, Rawmarsh, Rotherham.

I REFER to correspondents such as Gordon Lawrence and H Marjorie Gill (Yorkshire Post, September 21) on the side of Margaret Thatcher and then Tom Howley, who is against her (Yorkshire Post, September 4).

The disciples of Maggie want her on a pedestal with a 100 per cent perfect record of sheer goodness. Everyone who disagrees are dinosaurs who are in dreamland.

What I’d like to know, whether for or against Thatcher, is if Maggie was so perfect why did the Conservative Party get rid of her?

From: Trevor Woolley, Clough Drive, Linthwaite, Huddersfield.

I REALISE that Tory voters suffer from selective amnesia especially where the “blessed Margaret” is concerned but surely even Gordon Lawrence can’t have forgotten in his letter (Yorkshire Post, September 21) that Mrs Thatcher destroyed our manufacturing base in the North of England and made a whole generation of miners redundant, in so doing condemned their villages to poverty and suffering on a scale not seen since the Great Depression.

In case he needs a reminder, she was also responsible for the selling off of our gas and electricity and water. What a good job private industry has made of the running of these services!

I read recently that government funding of railways, privatised by Mrs Thatcher’s successor John Major, is presently greater than when BR was in public ownership!

Disciplined approach

From: Peter Hyde, Driffield.

I REFER to Malcolm Barker’s column (Yorkshire Post, September 21). Can you imagine the outcry if the suggestion that military-style discipline was introduced to our failing schools? The moronic gathering of parents opposing such treatment being inflicted on their little darlings would soon close the gates of any such school.

I was an instructor at a district police training centre and was known to be quite strict with the students yet I had young men and women who later thanked me. Some wives also expressed appreciation at the improvement they thought I had made to their spouses.

I guess my style would now bring down on my head the wrath of the powers-that-be.

Hard to live it up on the dole

From: G Ellison, Hawthorne Avenue, Dronfield.

A SINGLE unemployed person aged 25 plus receives £71 per week. If they live in council accommodation they have to pay the water rates or the water meter bill. In addition there are utility bills. If living in private accommodation and the council doesn’t cover the full rent, the claimant has to put towards it. And, of course, there are other costs, such as food, job search expenses and clothes.

There’s not a lot left to spend on drinking and smoking their life away in pubs, as some of your contributors seem to think. The younger claimants receive far less.