YP Letters: Brexit benefit should be felt at local level

THE UK’s exit from the European Union will have a significant impact on local government, creating challenges that need to be addressed but also opportunities to do things differently.

EU laws impact on many of the council services that affect people’s day-to-day lives. These range from deciding how to protect people from being served unsafe food when they eat out to regulating how councils buy goods and services. Local government must play a central role in deciding whether to keep, amend or scrap EU laws once converted into domestic law.

Brexit should not simply mean a transfer of powers from Brussels to Westminster, Holyrood, Stormont and Cardiff Bay.

It must lead to new legislative freedoms and flexibilities for councils so that residents and businesses benefit. Taking decisions over how to run local services closer to where people live is key to improving them and saving money.

Local areas in England have been allocated £5.3bn in EU regeneration funding by 2020 to create jobs, support small and medium-sized enterprises, deliver skills, and boost local growth across the country. The Government also needs to begin work with local government to develop a fully-funded and locally-driven successor scheme which gives local areas full control over spending.

It will also be important to secure continuing access to loans from the European Investment Bank.

From: Don Burslam, Elm Road, Dewsbury Moor, Dewsbury.

NOW Article 50 has been triggered, everyone, not least the politicians, should be clear whether they have a Plan B ready if the worst happens.

To argue as the usual people do that we have reached an irrevocable decision is arrogant and dictatorial. Young people in their millions who voted to remain will increasingly be affected as the years go by and their interests must not and cannot be ignored.

There must be room to correct what I believe is a terrible mistake if events take a certain course.

It makes no sense at all to continue on the same course if the ship is heading for the rocks.

From: ME Wright, Harrogate.

AS Article 50 is triggered, the PM vowed “I will get Brexit right for everyone” (The Yorkshire Post, March 29). In her speech to Parliament, she spoke of a Britain “of which our children and grandchildren could be proud”. With that in mind, some of of us took the trouble to seek the views of our children and grandchildren and voted ‘remain’. Whatever the outcome of EU negotiations and our sailing off into the relatively uncharted waters of globalisation, will there be a Plan B which ensures that, contrary to historical precedent, those already at the bottom of the pile are not further betrayed?

Thanks to years of Westminster indifference they, in understandable desperation, helped to launch HMS Brexit. It was further fuelled by my own privileged and comfortably retired generation. Many of these seem to have sulkily harboured dreams of Empire and a primitive distrust of anyone and anything “foreign”. Now their ship sets sail to the prissily patriotic strains of Rule Britannia.

As we desert our European brethren, we leave them to a fate even more uncertain than ours if Sir Bernard Ingham is right. Isn’t his gleeful response to throwing out the baby with the bathwater, not only chilling but thoroughly unBritish?

It could be argued that, if we end up with even more forelock tugging to a polluted and corrupted post-Trump America, then it serves us right.

From: Nick Martinek, Briarlyn Road, Huddersfield.

THE Article 50 letter is sent to reclaim our nation from the EU. No more rule from Brussels.

No more glowering, unelected EU Commissioners telling us what we can’t do. This is the time to take back control and restore our rightful place amongst the independent nations of the world.

The crucial issues are legal, of course: the supremacy of UK law; and the sovereignty that makes it possible. All the other benefits follow – democracy, fiscal and economic independence, control of our borders, control of farming and fisheries, the freedom to make our own 
trade deals, and many many others. Compared to those, our exports to the EU are a relatively minor concern at only around 10 per cent of UK GDP. A tenth of our economy is not to be sneezed at, of course, it is important. But nowhere near as important as the other 90 per cent of our economy, and our independence.

Arrested... for bloom picking

From: Peter Hyde, Driffield.

THERE has been quite a fuss made over the policewoman who stopped children picking daffodils from a public area.

In York, in the 1970s, you could get arrested for picking daffodils from the banks on the City walls. Each daffodil was valued at three pence.

This had the effect of stopping drunken people stripping huge areas of flowers. I recall a businessman being taken to court for this offence.

Help me find two evacuees

From: John Baker, Darlington.

I WAS hoping The Yorkshire Post might help me contact two evacuees, or their close relatives, who came to live with my parents during the war.

They were Barry and Betty Fenby who lived in Leeds, I believe it was the Seacroft area, and were evacuated to Upper Poppleton, outside York.

I met them once when they visited my parents on Coronation Day, when I was five.

I would like to know what recollections they have, or have passed on, of their time with my parents, both of whom died over 40 years ago.

I can be contacted via [email protected]