Letters to the Fenland Citizen editor – September 16, 2020
Breeding a society of wasters
I see the Chatteris Pocket Park is being vandalised. It was the recreation park off Huntingdon Road where the druggies used to recruit children as young as five as drug runners, but now they have moved parks for a change of scenery.
So these feral children, whose so-called parents let them out at 7am and let them wander the streets until midnight, are the result of generations of immature, delinquent children having children themselves because they are bored, with nothing to do.
Alas, what a society of wasters.
It appears the rabbit hutch bug hut has been vandalised, along with the fish sculpture and the netting around the pond.
I suppose next we shall find a shopping trolley in the pond and in three years’ time, when the wasters are fed up with the Pocket Park, they will move on somewhere else.
Jean Francis
Chatteris
There is going to be another death here
In 1989, on retirement from the Metropolitan Police, my wife wanted a “garden” within 50 miles of London.
However, our estate agent found Cranwell Lodge, a five acre nature reserve with orchards in the heart of a village.
We bought it without knowing that it faced a very nasty accident black spot – the junction of Main Road (the B1101) and Low Road.
Over the ensuing early years, we were aware of at least 127 accidents, including one fatal accident directly opposite our gates when a man was knocked off his bike by a lorry.
We have lost part of our gateway twice; next door lost their front wall once (and it is slowly going again) and a neighbour opposite lost his garden fence three times. Other properties in the village have suffered the same fate.
Speed approaching this junction from the south was a primary factor and in a very close second place, traffic turning out of Low Road was blind to all southbound traffic on the B1101.
Twice, I asked Cambridge Constabulary to set up a speed camera at the site and twice it was refused.
Traffic officers attending the scene on the first occasion told me that the short section of the B1101 from the junction of the A1101 to Elm School was the most dangerous piece of road in Cambridgeshire. They told me that there was no place that that they could safely do it.
The Cambridgeshire Highways Authority eventually altered the format of the junction which has given our neighbour’s front garden fence a reprieve but in doing so they have had to raise the level of the road yet again.
The camber of the road opposite our house and though part of the village is now some 12 inches higher than when we moved here, so much so that when it rains the water runs straight into our drive. The same problem exists with other properties on our side of the road.
When the Highways Authority last raised the road level, they left a man-hole cover some inches below the road surface which causes tremors every time a lorry hits it, so much so that the house shakes and I am afraid that it will eventually suffer.
To the crux of my letter! Of late, an ever-increasing number of huge articulated lorries, often with trailers, are using the B1101 in both directions and I am afraid that if nothing is done to contain this trend then death is going to happen again.
This part of the B1101 is totally inappropriate for this usage. At the very least the village deserves a width restrictor.
John Barnes
Elm
Locked down late, lifted it too early
I think this six people at a gathering rule is totally stupid. I don’t think anyone is seriously listening to this clap trap anymore.
I said at the start we should have locked down till September and then lifted the barricades.
What has happened is, we locked down too late and because of big buisness interests, the country’s economy and the cost of furlough and Universal Credit, we lifted the lockdown far too early.
So, as a consequence, we are now facing a second pandemic.
Unfortunately, what they are not saying is that this second peak is not necessarily the same , but a second mutation.
Most young people between 19 and 25 never took it seriously and complied with the restrictions at all. Their social life never seemed to have changed from the start of it.
What I can say is that if this power trip, as it is now being seen as, returns to a full lockdown, our goverment will lose all trust, power and control.
We have seen the anti-lockdown riots and protests in Australia and that’s what will happen here next.
It reminds me of that now banned colonial song they thought us at primary school: ‘Britain Never Never Will Be Slaves’ or should I slightly reword it to ‘Never will be Thick and Stupid Muppets’?
Sadly, I think goverment is losing credibility.
Mark Burton
Chatteris
Young adults not achieving income progress
The trends in housing, jobs and pay, and the welfare state can be brought together as disposable incomes, hence living standards.
Far from showing significant generational progress, millennials’ incomes have broadly tracked those of generations to date. The financial crisis also significantly reduced income progress for generation X, only after they enjoyed 15 years of much higher disposable incomes than the boomers had in their late-20s and 30s.
Older baby boomers have maintained significant generational income progress compared to the silent generation. Consumption levels are a direct measure of living standards, and popular narratives sometimes imply that millennials are particularly high spenders. But the evidence on spending reinforces that on incomes. In 2001 young adults were spending the same as 55-64-year-olds; they are now spending 15 per cent less.
Household wealth is growing rapidly overall, but despite this, cohorts born after 1960 are not accumulating more assets than their predecessors.
Unexpected house price and pension windfalls have largely benefited older cohorts with existing wealth and are unlikely to be repeated in future. Inequalities of income within generations are higher for younger people today than for their predecessors.
There is a risk that the growing importance of inheritances means intergenerational gaps combine with intra-generational inequalities to hold back social mobility. Bringing together earnings, housing and the welfare state, younger adults are achieving little in income progress.
John White
Wisbech
Please sign our petition
We are calling on people to sign our petition urging Government to ban lower standard imports.
Manifesto promises and parliamentary pronouncements guaranteeing to protect our high welfare standards have not been backed up by the legal protections that are essential to ensure the Government does not roll back on their commitment to protect British farmers and their animals.
The realities of chlorine washed chicken and hormone-treated beef ending up on our supermarket shelves have been well documented, but British consumers also face having products from pigs produced using sow stalls, banned in the UK since 1999, and egg products from laying hens kept in barren battery cages, also illegal in this country since 2012.
We urge UK shoppers to sign our petition at www.rspca.org.uk/agribill.
Chris Sherwood
CEO RSPCA
Just pay them what they are entitled to
According to The Independent, the Department for Work & Pensions (DWP) has spent a record £121m in taxpayers’ money fighting disability benefit claims in the last two years.
The data, obtained through a freedom of information request, shows that between 2017-18 and 2018-19, the DWP spent £58m spent on mandatory reconsiderations and £63m on tribunal appeals.
Over the same period, the number of claims for the benefits – known as Personal Independence Payment (PIP) and Employment Support Allowance (ESA) – increased by just 13 per cent.
Claimants go through an initial, internal appeal with the DWP called mandatory reconsideration, before being able to take their case to tribunal.
But the latest figures show 76 per cent of PIP and 75 per cent of ESA appeals cleared at tribunal hearing are overturned in favour of the claimant.
The DWP’s continuing failure to make correct decisions on PIP and ESA claims is having a devastating impact on disabled people at a staggering cost to the public purse.
The DWP could save itself a great deal of money and effort by simply paying disabled people the benefits they are entitled to in the first place.
John Smithee
Wisbech
