Letters: September 24, 2016

Anonymity is granted only at the discretion of the editor, who also reserves the right to edit letters.

Corbyn’s future plans

TODAY the Labour Party will announce the result of the disgraceful coup attempt that was launched against the leader Jeremy Corbyn by the parties PLP and backed by the NEC.

This was despite his overwhelming popularity, along with a record membership. The result between the leader Jeremy Corbyn and the challenger Owen Smith will be announced today.

An ‘ex-would be’ Labour Prime Minister Neil Kinnock said on BBC’s Panorama programme that: “Unless things change radically it is doubtful that I will see another Labour government in my lifetime.”

He must be speaking from a very understandable viewpoint on the subject having led the Labour party to two general election defeats. There is something in folk law about the pot calling the kettle something which in this instance is surely most applicable.

It surely does not make sense for the party to wish to fight against the policies of Jeremy Corbyn that so very many people endorse up and down the country, such as re-nationalising the NHS by removing private interests, negotiating away PFI deals that have been such an expensive drag on the service, and the same for schools that have also been built under the scheme.

Corbyn also wants to return our railways to state ownership to replace the current high fares franchised system that has failed the public and left us with the most expensive railway in Europe.

Absurdly, some of the profits are being ploughed into the pockets of foreign owners to maintain their own state run rail networks.

He also wants to stop further disgraceful means testing and the cutting of disabled people’s benefits and the appalling system of sanctions against the unemployed at job centres for the most trivial of reasons, which very often sends them into a downhill spiral of poverty and debt, with some having to go to food banks or worse still finding themselves homeless and living on the streets.

He wants to get rid of the vicious employer zero hours contracts schemes that have soared by 24 per cent since the start of this year.

The excesses of fat cat barons like Mike Ashley, of Sports Direct, who flaunts his wealth while impoverishing his workforce, and Philip Green who sucked BHS dry and did the workers out of their pensions must stop for good.

Corbyn wants to build many more houses with affordable rents, with at least half of them being council houses so everyone has a right to a roof over their head which, sadly, is currently, far from the case.

And he wants to start investing in industrial and civil infrastructure by establishing a £500bn network of regional and national investment banks, which are so badly needed to make up the shortfall of our current banks that, due to the choice of a system of austerity in the country, loathe lending any money for such things.

And he wants to establish local green energy initiatives, so to compete directly against the cartel-like current system of the ‘big six’ and thus bring in more competition and thus put an end to the ever spiralling costs that hit the poorest in our society the most.

Finally of course there are very many more things of benefit to people that I cannot possibly mention here, however

Such ideas should not be dismissed out of hand as things must change as the increasing inequality caused by austerity and the mismanagement of bankers and speculators, not just in this country but in others, cannot be allowed to continue inexorably.

A WOODWARD

Nelson Street, Swindon

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Happy with the Tories?

I WISH to make a comment on David Collins’ letter on September 19 in which he calls anybody from the Labour Party, or who is Socialist, he calls loonies.

Does that mean that he is from the right and therefore a Fascist?

He states that Labour cannot do finance and business but he must like the bankers doing what they want and fleecing the public.

So much for the Tories and their friends in the public sector. The Tories have let the NHS go to the wall, is he happy with this?

HELEN THOMPSON

Princes Street, Swindon

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‘Economically illiterate’

THE comprehensive review of Hinkley has been a total sham.

If Theresa May had seriously listened to a wide range of experts she would have concluded the project was economically illiterate, technically flawed, environmentally risky and a threat to security.

But it seems that in post-Brexit Britain the Government has decided to turn its back on experts and try and demonstrate that the UK is open for business.

And so we see a Government willing to hand over our energy infrastructure to the Chinese Communist Party and a giant French corporation.

This is the exact opposite of taking back control, which would come through a renewable energy revolution.

As Germany and other countries have shown, community owned renewables can take power away from foreign corporations and governments and hand it back to the people, generating thousands of home grown jobs in the process.

The Government says it will introduce greater scrutiny of future deals to protect national security, but not for Hinkley C.

Why, if the current arrangements need to be changed, are they good enough for the people of the south west?

Effectively, the Government is acknowledging we will all have to pay for a massive error in our approach to the ownership and control of critical infrastructure.

With Lib Dem Ed Davy instrumental in pushing the Hinkley deal as Secretary of State For Energy and Labour stuck in the nuclear bunker, supporting a discredited scheme to keep British unions happy, only the Green Party will continue to oppose this expensive and disastrous white elephant.

MEP MOLLY SCOTT CATO

European Parliament

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Development objection

LAST week a Wiltshire Council planning committee voted by five votes to three to approve the planning application for 700 houses on Rawlings Farm, just north of Monkton Park.

The five who voted in favour were all Conservatives.

Houses have to be built around Chippenham but this was a bad decision, based on an equally bad process, as I am sure the public who came to the meeting will agree.

Along with more than 150 Chippenham residents, I objected to the application, not because it’s in our backyard or we will be overlooked by it, but because we identified 10 council and national planning policies on which the application failed.

Yet none of the councillors who approved the application spent time on these planning issues before sticking up their hands.

The policies that were breached included landscape, protection of wildlife, saving top-quality agricultural land, air quality and traffic and highways.

The problems of existing congestion on Station Hill and beside the railway station, are well known.

The new development will bring on to this congested road all the traffic from 700 houses that wants to access the station, the town centre, the three secondary schools or is going to the south and west.

There are plans for another exit from the development but this requires a multi-million pound railway bridge on land where the ownership is disputed between the council and Wavin.

And that northern route won’t be used by people who want to go towards the centre.

What’s worse is that the developer is being allowed to build and sell up to 200 houses on the site with no northern exit at all.

All the construction lorries for those 200 houses will also be grinding up and down Station Hill.

No attention has been paid to the air pollution issues in that narrow street, again in contradiction of national and local policy.

Not only did residents and local councillors point all this out but also two independent professional traffic consultants.

The result was just a few lines in a committee report claiming traffic lights at the New Road junction would solve the problems. But these planning defects were given almost no attention in a brief discussion, before the five Conservative members voted it through.

Nor did those five spare a moment to consider the situation in which the residents of Rawlings Farm Cottage find themselves, surrounded by a new development, not informed when the application was sent in and ignored by the developer, the planning officer’s report and by the committee.

Whatever the planning laws say, this was a shocking lack of decency and compassion.

All this was being decided less than two weeks before the Government inspector’s inquiry into the Rawlings Green development and other council plans for Chippenham housing.

The application decision was ‘premature’, not just in common sense but also according to national planning policy.

Inspectors have ruled twice against those plans, and it is being asked whether Rawlings Green is deliverable and whether the bridge will ever be built.

Approving this application last week can only be seen as an attempt to pre-empt the the public inquiry.

So why was such a flawed application taken to a council committee at this stage?

Why did the majority of councillors on the committee ignore the council’s own planning policies? What’s the point of planning policies if they can be ignored?

Hopefully the inspector will want to get some answers next week. In the meantime, something has gone badly wrong with planning Chippenham’s housing future.

CHRIS CASWILL

Independent Wiltshire councillor

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Everyone is awesome

WHAT a great result for our countrymen and women who won medals in Rio.

All having faced their own problems and used grit and determination to achieve a wonderful result and accolade.

Radio chats and TV appearances will give them a high after their achievements and quite rightly so.

But, hang on a minute, what about those who don’t feature in the publicity, who didn’t win any medals but, who had the same grit and determination but just lacked that little ‘extra’ this time?

Let’s give them all credit. So, to all of you who didn’t win a medal, very well done, you deserve the utmost credit for your endeavours and there will be a next time I am sure.

CHRIS GLEED

Proud Close, Purton