YP Letters: More money is no answer to social woes

From: Gordon Lawrence, Sheffield.
Jeremy Corbyn is accused of raising the hopes of the young.Jeremy Corbyn is accused of raising the hopes of the young.
Jeremy Corbyn is accused of raising the hopes of the young.

IT concerns me and, I believe, a host of others, at the constant call for more and more money to be thrown at problems that are exaggerated in the context of the country’s overall situation.

Special interest groups, who are past masters at gaining access to a hungry media, are the ones who create the greatest volume of noise and they are usually aggressively backed by left-wing zealots who would never consider how the money they attempt to extract is created by a printing machine at the Royal Mint or in the vast acres of Britain’s money tree orchards.

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Stealing from other people’s pockets has become an art form in the human rights business – political correctness is a potent source for justifying this haemorrhaging of taxpayers’ lifeblood. We constantly hear the plaintive calls for new government interventions and regulation that calls for costly bureaucratic hierarchies to be set up. Very often the fundamental reason for the problem arising in the first place is some sacred political cow.

The most lethal weapon of Jeremy Corbyn and most of the left, as well as the rising influence of the under-25s, is the word “austerity”; it is almost a meaningless cliché but it not only acts as a battle cry for the economically illiterate but saves them from having to put forward any logical argument.

Very few can see it is their persistent demands for more public money to be shovelled into the ovens of social self-indulgence that cutbacks have to be initiated in vital wealth-creating schemes such as a Hull to Liverpool railway link, a road tunnel through the south Pennines from Sheffield to Manchester (the Snake Pass A57 – a national disgrace not to have been short circuited before) and so much more.

And, of course, the overpowering debt (Gordon Brown’s legacy of overspending, for example), now £1.7 trillion, wrought by the wasteful profligacy I’ve already cited, inhibits the possibility of satisfying the very issues eventually that the Left and young people’s lobby champion.

No captive breeding here

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From: Su Gough, Communication and PR Officer, Hawk and Owl Trust, Sculthorpe, Fakenham, Norfolk.

I FELT obliged to write in response to your article “What does the future hold for pigeon racing? The sport born in a Leeds pub”.

We are all entitled to our own beliefs on the balance of wild birds of prey and domestic pigeons, and I am not writing to open that can of worms. However, the reporting of completely incorrect ‘facts’ needs to be refuted.

The largest single inaccuracy is the frequently repeated misinformation that peregrines (and other birds of prey) in the UK have been subject to reintroduction and breeding programmes. This is simply untrue, indeed it is illegal to release captive bred individuals.

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Yes, populations have risen, but only back to the levels seen before persecution and DDT and they have achieved this through a reversal of the causes, and protection provided by bird lovers. Despite this, the peregrine population has actually fallen in the UK by 13 per cent in the last 22 years.

Don’t blame the children

From: Hugh Rogers, Messingham Road, Ashby.

IF four out of every 10 primary school children fail to meet Government standards in such basic subjects as reading, writing and arithmetic, clearly that is a damning indictment on the quality of the teachers, not of the children (The Yorkshire Post, July 5).

SATs are the only available way of testing how well schools and teachers are performing. But teachers’ unions and misguided individual teachers are busily trying to shift the blame on to the kids. How very noble of them!

Airing a small grievance

From: M Peacock, Ash Tree Road, Bedale.

BRIDGE Street in Bedale is now a polluted area (The Yorkshire Post, June 27) here in a small rural town. For those who don’t know, Bridge Street is approximately 100 yards (90m) long.

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Half of that distance used to be lined on both sides with very old cottages and stables. We have had no deaths there to my knowledge, as a resident, over the last 53 years!

However the ‘powers that be’ at Northallerton permitted some old buildings to be demolished and a monster four storey block to be built in their place. One can only wonder if this, in turn, is interfering with air flow and capturing traffic gasses. They need to look at traffic flow.

Knife a tool, not weapon

From: Arthur Quarmby, Mill Moor Road, Meltham.

AN explosion in knife crime is reported, and mostly amongst teenagers.

A sheath knife was (and perhaps still is?) a normal part of a scout’s uniform. We all carried sheath knives, yet I never heard of any knife crime in scouting.

To us the knife was a tool, never a weapon. How and why has there been such a change? Is it a decline in scouting?