YP Letters: Labour will hit pensioners in the pocket

LABOUR’S criticism of means testing the winter fuel allowance and maintaining the triple lock would suggest they are the party that looks after the elderly. However, the truth is far different.

In 1997, the Chancellor with the sleight of hand, Gordon Brown, removed the tax credit on dividend payments for pension funds. Since then and up to last year, pension funds have lost a total of £150bn of tax credits.

Cumulatively over the period in question, pension funds would now be worth an estimated £300bn more. Assessing the reduced income that pension funds now produce suggests that today these pension funds could have been producing an extra £15bn a year. The income tax alone would be sizeable, but take into account the lost purchasing power and one realises how draconian and how deliberate the sleight of hand was by Brown.

Jeremy Corbyn is cast from the same mould when it comes to trickery and smoke and mirrors. Oddly, his attack on pension funds almost exactly mirrors his predecessor. Labour dislike big business, particularly profitable big business.

So when Corbyn proposes his 50 per cent corporation tax, let us recognise that tens of millions of us, the poor and the wealthy alike, will have our pension funds inhibited by diminished growth as the dividend payments will not be maintained. When the day comes to draw the income we will also need to thank Corbyn that it will be substantially less.

Two hits on pensioners incomes by two unremarkable people.

From: George McManus, Whins Lane, Long Riston.

I WAS delighted to hear Ed Miliband say that he supported Jeremy Corbyn’s manifesto and that Tory austerity had failed.

In July 2014, I begged Labour’s National Policy Forum to drop their commitment to austerity but when it was put to the vote, I was defeated.

Had Ed agreed to drop austerity at that stage, Labour could have won the election. Not only might we have avoided calls for a second Scottish referendum and a further two years of devastating austerity cuts, we would have been spared the disaster that is Brexit. On such decisions does fate revolve.

From: Janet Berry, Hambleton.

IT is hard to understand how seemingly intelligent people are to vote for Jeremy Corbyn and his two cronies – Diane Abbott and John McDonnell. Anyone who listed to Corbyn’s interview on Woman’s Hour would surely have been dismayed. He had no figures available and his answers were a series of silences or sighs as he tried to find the solution desperately tapping on his iPad, embarrassing to listen to and quite frightening.

Then we have Diane Abbott who was clueless about costs and blamed her lack of knowledge on being tired because she had had lots of interviews.

Worst of all is the sinister self- confessed Marxist John McDonnell who has had to retract statements he has made in the past because they were so controversial and supported the IRA, as indeed Mr Corbyn did.

It is all very well offering all these wonderful things in the Labour manifesto but everything has to be paid for and this trio seem to have no idea where the money is coming from.

From: Alan Chapman, Beck Lane, Bingley.

JEREMY Corbyn claims Labour will vastly expand the public sector security staff by increasing the numbers of police, prison officers, border guards, MI5 etc.

The wage bill will be massive, but what a waste of our money as they will not get the required legislation to become effective. Corbyn has persistently voted against all new or amended legislation on terrorist laws throughout his career.

We know his record of cosying up to the IRA and Hamas and recently he gives the impression of being too tolerant of Islam. Why is it he is always on the side of our country’s enemies?

From: David Loxley, Pickering.

JEREMY Corbyn has the rabble-rousing approach by promising all things to all men (and women) and, in the main, free. The rabble-rousing is being done for him by others, a familiar pattern: witness that fiasco in Cambridge last Wednesday prior to the seven-way BBC debate when the socialist arm behaved like nothing more than jackals and hyenas fighting over a dead mouse.

If the governance of the United Kingdom were to fall into the hands of this man, the outcome would be disastrous politically and economically.

D-Day marked on our minds

From: Celia Woolfe, Wentbridge.

THE Saturday essay by Dan Jarvis (The Yorkshire Post, June 3) struck a chord with me.

My father (Royal Engineers) landed at Bernieres-sur-Mer (Juno Beach) with the Canadians on the morning of June 6, 1944. According to his diary, he witnessed some horrible sights.

As we were growing up, every June 6 he would solemnly ask us “You know what day it is today?” and knowing how important it was for him personally, we would solemnly reply: “Yes. D-Day.”

My father died in 1976, but even after all these years, we never let June 6 go by unmarked.

Have a word please, ma’am

From: Canon Michael Storey, Healey Wood Road, Brighouse.

HOW sad that the Duke of Edinburgh’s command of Queen’s English is so limited! In your ever-interesting column “Words of the week” (The Yorkshire Post, June 3) the Duke was quoted as saying to TV’s Michael Palin, when told that he was going to Korea: “Oh God. Don’t start a bloody war.”

That is just seven words including blasphemy and a swear word. I do hope that the Queen had a word of reprimand with him later.