YP Letters: City on right track with tram plan

THE proposal to develop an initial tram route from Leeds city centre to south Leeds and Stourton put forward by Paula Dillon, president of Leeds Chamber of Commerce (The Yorkshire Post, November 21), deserves strong support from Leeds City Council, the West Yorkshire Combined Authority and the public at large.

Leeds has a disastrous record of failed tram projects stretching back 70 years, long before the recent debacles over the tram and trolleybus schemes. The future economic strength of Leeds depends on it throwing off the mantle of the largest city in Europe with no mass transit system and this proposal could be a practicable way forward.

The city council recently missed a golden opportunity when it decided to spend £173.5m on buses and a couple of stations instead of making a start on a tramway.

I chaired the technical team which developed the initial tram scheme for Manchester back in the 1980s.

At that time many people thought it was a waste of time and would never happen. Now nobody can imagine Manchester without its trams. Leeds has 35 years to catch up. Paula Dillon’s plan should be progressed as rapidly as possible.

From: Bob Watson, Baildon.

PAULA Dillon, the new president of the Leeds Chamber of Commerce, is quite right in asking for a tram route between the city centre and Stourton. This should be a prelude to a much-needed full tram network in the relatively near future.

It is all very well Labour council leader Judith Blake stating that delivering a rapid mass-transit system remains a key priority.

Perhaps she would like to consider how many years have elapsed since a supertram system was first proposed, and then consider how her council’s incompetence has got us precisely nowhere in all those intervening years.

From: Gerald Hodgson, Spennithorne, Leyburn.

YOUR headline “Workers could save by commuting to London from South Yorkshire” (The Yorkshire Post, November 21) reinforces a point I have felt strongly for a long time, namely that HS2 will simply suck more talent and resources into 
London from the rest of the nation.

Overseas experience supports this contention. High-speed 
lines from provincial cities in France and Japan have had exactly the effect of centralising more resources in Paris and Tokyo.

HS2 is not wanted by people in the South of England impacted by the proposal and will be counter-productive to the North.

What we need is sensible upgrading of rail services across the North of England (including full electrification), a rail link to Leeds-Bradford Airport and a modern urban transport system for the Leeds-Bradford conurbation. All of this could be done at a fraction of the cost of HS2.

From: Eddie Peart, Broom Chase, Broom Crescent, Rotherham.

PHILIP Hammond is being hounded by the press in London to fork out £7bn to improve transport links between Oxford and Cambridge.

My bet is that they will get it and the North will have to wait again.

Bittersweet flower mix-up

From: Mrs J Cleal, St Ellen’s Court, Beverley.

WHILE reading your Country Week section (November 18), I was attracted to the article by Julian Norton which showed an illustration of a pretty lilac and yellow flower.

The flower illustrated is not deadly nightshade (atropa belladonna) but a relative of it called bittersweet (solanum dulcamara) which has bright red berries that are poisonous but not so deadly as the shiny black berries of deadly nightshade.

The misnomer is very common.

Deadly nightshade berries are very toxic and do kill. The plant is quite rare and the flowers are larger, bell shaped and of a dull, brownish-dark purple colour.

Bittersweet used to be a very common hedgerow plant (although I see it less often now).

The flowers are small and attractive, followed by little berries that change from green through yellow to a glistening bright red.

Any wildflower identification book will confirm that the plant illustrated was not deadly nightshade.

Big questions of our time

From: G Cooper, Mill Street, Barlow, Dronfield.

NEVER mind about Brexit, the Northern Powerhouse or devolution, the three most important questions we have to answer are these:

n 1. When a politician says “that’s unacceptable”, why does he or she then believe they’ve solved the problem?

n 2. Why do you feel, when speaking to a customer service adviser, medical consultant or doctor, that you should apologise because you don’t understand their heavily accented English?

n 3. Are they going to let the man who designed the new £10 notes design anything else?

Get tough on acid attacks

From: Dave Croucher, Pinfold Gardens, Doncaster.

WE have seen, over the past few weeks, the damage and devastating damage done to the victims of acid attacks.

We hear that the Home Office has now proposed that people caught twice carrying acid should be imprisoned for six months.

It’s time for Amber Rudd and the rest of the Government to wake up and smell the coffee – this is no deterrent to the people who carry out these atrocious crimes.

Acid should only be purchased under licence.