Fenland Citizen letters – May 13, 2020
They should pay back money
It would be nice if the vastly rich Royal Family, a completely unnecessary institution, repaid the taxpayers’ cost of renovating the marital home – ‘Frogmore Cottage’ – of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, now they have gone to wherever.
£2million would help the UK now and the struggling Food Banks.
Mick Cahill
Wisbech
Taxpayers should be given more power
John Smithee has drawn attention to the outrageous and obscene salaries paid to council staff.
All council staff appear to live in a world where salaries and responsibility towards the taxpayer are meaningless.
In 2014 I asked the information officer at West Norfolk Borough Council how much council tax was owed and what was being done to recover it.
He refused to reply to this request.
I asked the body of councillors to follow the example of other councils and abolish the post of chief executive. They ignored this request.
This council needs training to understand that its comfortable and secure salaries come from the taxpayer.
The taxpayer should be given far more power and influence to decide the pay levels of these people.
Steve Lund-Beck
Walton Highway
This is an abolition of freedom
Regarding your story where a reader complained about social distancing rules not being observed by the builders putting up the new primary school in Chatteris.
The two metre rule over coronavirus was plucked out of thin air and is not even medically based.
The medical experts say only one metre is sufficient. And this ridiculous social distancing practice where perfectly healthy people are having to avoid coming too close to one another is ridiculous.
Why have so many sane healthy people all of a sudden turned into robotic slaves to the Government’s demands?
Got to wear my mask, wash my hands for 20 seconds, don’t get to close to a another person in case they kill you with their virus.
It’s just not practical to go about your life without getting within two metres of another person wherever you go.
When will this abolition of freedoms, that our ancestors fought and died for, end?
Surely our liberty is more important than a virus that won’t kill nearly as many as the common influenza?
I suppose if you scare people enough then they will do whatever you want them to.
The fact of the matter is the vast majority of the population do not have the virus and just want to get on with their lives.
The scaremongering going on at the moment is very worrying.
Its very sad that people are losing their lives to this virus, but I can’t believe governments around the world are crippling their economies, with people losing their jobs and livelihoods in the name of saving a very small percentage of their populations.
It’s about time we let them know that we all don’t have the virus, so stop assuming we have.
Eddie King
Elm
Are accurate figures possible?
The Government has promised to step up testing for coronavirus in care homes where symptoms of the virus have been found. But is it possible to get accurate figures about how many deaths there have been?
There are more than 15,000 care homes in England, compared with about 200 hospitals trusts. There is a two-week time lag in the data collected.
The most recent figures are for the week ending April 10, where there had been 1,043 COVID-19 deaths in care homes in England and Wales – about 10 per cent of all deaths.
This is a high proportion, considering they house less than one per cent of the country’s population.
J. White
Wisbech
What is the real story?
Last Friday, the British ruling class, the Tories and Labour leader Keir Starmer, celebrated VE Day.
VE day should be celebrated. Every time we discuss what happened with the generation who lived through that war, we learn something.
What is the real story of what happened in 1945? When Winston Churchill addressed the crowds in London, he claimed: “This is a victory for no party or class, but a victory for all.”
But working class people’s conclusions were different.At the end of the war, in Britain 500,000 were homeless and four million homes were bomb damaged.
The wartime coalition had faced a militant strike wave in key war industries, and a mood of organisation from the officer corps and rank-and-file soldiers.
In mainland Europe, the human suffering was unimaginably worse, and a revolutionary wave was seen.
In Britain, Churchill is presented as a ‘hero’ today, but was thrown out and a Labour government voted in that was forced to nationalise 20% of the economy, set up the NHS and build council housing.
As we celebrated VE day – then as now – there can be no going back.
John Smithee
Wisbech
Previously...
