YP Letters: Police move led to parking chaos in Northallerton

LIKE your correspondent Joyce Gudgeon (The Yorkshire Post, March 2), I know of no one who voted for our police commissioner Julia Mulligan. It is a position foisted upon us by the Conservative Government.

When the move to Crosby Road, Northallerton, from Newby Wiske was mooted, it was well publicised that there would be parking for only half the number of cars for staff.

The situation is quite dangerous in the streets around Crosby Road which are full of extra cars parking on corners, bends and across the entrances to homes. One resident I know, having been blocked in on numerous occasions, now parks his cars outside his house rather than, safely, on his driveway.

At the same time, you reported upon the proposed redevelopment of the prison site, which is within yards of the new police headquarters. This involves shops (more than 10 empty in the High Street at the last count), a cinema which will greatly affect the viability of The Forum which is a wonderful facility run by volunteers and shows all films, National Theatre Live productions and is well supported. Surely the answer is a multi-storey car-park?

BBC stars’ tax responsibility

From: Tony Armitage, Fulwith Road, Harrogate.

THE BBC licence fee lacks value for money in many respects, but I am pleased to read that their self-acclaimed “stars” are being refused assistance with liabilities to HMRC.

This is nothing to do with National Insurance contributions and these tax demands are not liabilities of the BBC.

These stars actively incorporated personal service companies for their own perceived tax advantages. They may or may not have taken professional advice at the time, but that was their personal choice.

If they did not take advice before incorporation they should do so now and if they did take advice which no longer suits them, they should talk to their advisers again.

If these service companies are ever to be in receipt of a tax refund, I very much doubt the stars will be paying a part of that to the BBC to subsidise the licence fee.

From: ME Wright, Harrogate.

LIKE Brian Sheridan (The Yorkshire Post, March 5), I find The Guardian and Telegraph so politically predictable. I find that The Yorkshire Post does a very good job of reinforcing and challenging my own views, with less danger of apoplexy!

Only once have I seen America’s Fox News. It was presented by a most fearsome-looking female, with padded shoulders and a voice fit to cut Sheffield steel. Whatever her faults, let’s stick with ‘Auntie’. The BBC is followed and admired all over the world – including America.

Thatcher still gets blame

From: Ross Taggart, The Avenue, Eaglescliffe, Stockton-on-Tees.

A CORRESPONDENT (The Yorkshire Post, February 26) appears to be one of a band of people who persist in laying the blame for any woe, this time economic, on the head of a long-dead Conservative prime minister.

Was it Mrs Thatcher who rewarded the financial wizardry of a certain Mr Fred Goodwin with a knighthood? Was it Margaret Thatcher who considered PFI to be such a 
jolly good wheeze that it 
should be used to the nth 
degree?

One could go on; suffice it to point out that when she left power the country was in the rudest of economic health compared to the state it was in by 2010.

Surely we could move on to blaming someone else. President Trump perhaps?

Cartoonist’s perfect match

From: Brian Sheridan, Lodge Moor, Sheffield.

IT will be a sad day when Morris’s prodigious output finally 
runs out. There is not a daily cartoonist out there whose work is not uneven to some degree, especially those who rely on topicality, but Morris’s timeless humour never fails to make 
me smile.

The age of his Horace & Doris cartoons is regularly betrayed 
by their details such as the 
old-fashioned telephones 
and bulky TV sets with indoor aerials but this matters not 
one jot.

In my opinion, cynicism without cruelty is at the heart 
of the best jokes.

The lazy, boorish husband and the spendthrift, nagging wife are both deeply unattractive characters: they deserve 
each other, and Morris 
makes sure that there is no 
clear victim.

On course for an honour

From: Elisabeth Baker, Leeds.

YOU report (The Yorkshire Post, March 5) that the newly 
unveiled Leeds Civic Trust plaque commemorating Benjamin Gott is the first specifically dedicated to a person.

You have been misinformed. A few years ago a plaque was unveiled at The Corner 
House Club, at the junction 
of Lidgett Lane and 
Harrogate Road in 
Moortown, to commemorate 
Dr Alister Mackenzie, who 
lived there from 1907 until 
1929.

Dr Mackenzie is described 
on the plaque as “The great 
golf course architect” and a number of his designs are 
named including Augusta National, with Bobby Jones, in 1933-34.