GENERAL ELECTION 2019: Your letters
Action is needed over affordable homes
John Smithee has asked about housing and the building of affordable homes as well as the existential housing crisis. He is right to ask because action is needed.
This was further highlighted by the report by Sarah Cliss in the same November 27 edition regarding the proposed house building on the old gas site off Chase Street, Wisbech.
The submitted plans are for 19 new homes to be built but the developers have said that NONE can be designated as affordable homes.
This is disgraceful, and Conservative-controlled Fenland Council should hold them to account. Building affordable houses should not be a choice.
It may result in the developer making a decreased profit, but please do not be fooled, there will still be a profit.
Access to accommodation should come before profit, people before £’s. In this case in point the developers’ profit may fall below 17.5%.
Affordable homes are needed and all new developments are meant to have an allocation.
We simply cannot get out of this housing crisis by allowing housing developers to ride rough-shod over the regulations that are in place to ensure affordable housing is built.
In 2018-2019 in the whole of the East of England only 530 homes were built for social rent.
A decade before four and a half thousand were being built. That is a change overseen by the Conservatives both nationally and locally.
At the same time private rental prices have increased. Labour has ambitious plans to be building 16,000 new council and social houses a year by the end of their first term in office. North East Cambridgeshire will benefit from this.
Labour will look at the concept of “affordable” housing to re-assess what the level should be, with consideration of local incomes.
They will deliver a new discount on homes for first-time buyers and a new charter of rights for private renters.
Diane Boyd,
Labour Party candidate, N E Cambs.
It’s Brexit decision day
Here we are, facing Brexitmageddon, Brexit D-Day, with the Brexlection day on Thursday, and some people are no closer to unravelling the mystery of the conundrum of who to vote for.
In a nutshell, if you want ANY sort of a Brexit, you vote for Steve Barclay and the Conservative Party, if you don’t want a Brexit at all, then vote for anybody else.
Boris wants to ‘Get Brexit Done’. Corbyn and Labour want to go back to the EU and renegotiate a deal.
By negotiate, Corbyn plans to go to the EU, re-open Theresa May’s hated deal, and ask for the word ‘Backstop’ to be removed, for the inclusion of even more migration into Britain, even more British laws to be made in Brussels, and the customs union, meaning that the UK can NEVER agree ANY trade deal outside of the Eurozone.
The Liberal Democrats just want to get their own way, and punch our democratic values hard and straight between the legs.
For any Scottish voters locally, Nicola Sturgeon, the SNP and their REAL plan? Why is she pushing so hard to stop Brexit, when she wants to break up the UK? If we leave the EU, and Scotland vote to leave the UK, then overnight Scotland would become one of the most in-debt nations in the world.
If they leave the UK when we are free from the EU, they would be bankrupt, but if we were still in the EU, then bail-outs WOULD be applied for to save Scotland.
There are many, many other important topics but, unless Brexit gets done, then we will not have any money left to save the rest of the UK.
We would be punished into paying billions more into their coffers, and to reimburse Scotland’s imprisonment to our nation.
Do you vote for Great Britain, the UK and the Commonwealth, or do you just vote to miss out most of that and give away ALL our history, our respect and our wealth?
History will show who’s on the right side, and if I am not, then I fear for our future.
Ashley Smith,
March.
Can you believe it?
So it’s finally arrived – Election Day is Thursday.
Watching the televised hustings the issue of trust is continually mentioned.
I’ve listened to the various parties and I honestly don’t know who to believe and who not to trust.
But are we, the voters, guilty of the biggest ‘hoodwinking’?
The opinion polls ‘lied’ over Brexit and the last election – can you trust us voters?!
Derek Harvey,
Wisbech.
His assertions over Labour were so funny
I am one of those well intentioned people who intend to vote Labour (David Silver, Letters, December 4). I have to say I really enjoyed Mr Silver’s letter as his assertions were so funny.
For example; “Corbyn and his fellow travellers are all about gaining power”. Well yeh, but no, but yeh but, isn’t that the purpose of having a political party with policies and standing in an election?
Could you imagine Boris or Jeremy on December 13 turning up at the door of No 10 and saying: “Sorry we didn’t actually intend to get into power we only held the election for a larf”?
“Corbyn will be enacting changes to electoral law, immigration law and taxation law”. Yeh but that is the purpose of government, parliament is a law making body and enacting laws is what all government’s try to do.
101 years ago a Liberal government gave some women the vote and 10 years later a Conservative government extended that to the women the Liberals didn’t give the vote. Both those involved changes to electoral law as did the later reduction of the voting age to 18.
The Tories have changed immigration and taxation law over the last 9 years and all prime ministers take control of the levers of power. The purpose of a democracy is that we can hold the law makers to account at least every 5 years – at present, though, it seems every other year.
Commissions, royal or parliamentary, have been a feature of our government for centuries. It is a core part of our democracy. It is a way of achieving change while taking into account, in theory at least, a wide range of opinion and experience. If ‘Animal Farm’ was coming the last thing you would expect is a raft of commissions to accompany it.
Between 1945 and 1970 this country was in effect a socialist country. It had a national health service, welfare state, free state education up to university level, nationalised utilities and more publicly owned rented housing than the Soviet Union.
These post war socialist policies prompted Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in 1957 to state: “You’ve never had it so good”.
Sue Dockett,
Wisbech.
Don't believe all you read
David Silver (Readers’ Views, December 4) shouldn’t believe all he reads in the Daily Mail about Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn.
Whilst Mr Corbyn’s Chief of Staff, Andrew Murray, is a former member of the Communist Party of Britain, and Mr Corbyn’s Press Secretary, Seamus Milne, is a former business manager of the now defunct Straight Left newspaper, they both have little if any influence on Labour’s policies.
The policies put forward in Labour’s Manifesto are put together by a joint meeting of Labour’s National Executive Committee and representatives of the Parliamentary Labour Party based on decisions of the October Labour conference.
As for Mr Corbyn’s alleged support for Venezuela’s so-called ‘socialist’ government, I must point out the extreme poverty experienced by Venezuela is a direct result of sanctions imposed by Trump and Obama administrations in the US, together with the fall in oil prices.
As for Mr Silver’s analogy between Mr Corbyn and his supporters with the pigs in George Orwell’s famous book, Animal Farm, I must say that Mr Silver has got things the wrong way around.
The book was an analogy of the battle in the Soviet Union between Joseph Stalin and his supporters (the pigs) and Leon Trotsky (the old horse).
Mr Corbyn has more in common with Leon Trotsky (co-leader with Lenin of the Russian revolution, and founder of the Red Army) than he has with Joseph Stalin, who led the counter-revolution in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s.
However, Mr Corbyn, contrary to the propaganda of the Daily Mail, is no Marxist. He is a dithering, ill-advised, reformist whose mild policies are to the right of the programme put forward by the Social Democratic Party in the 1983 general election.
John Smithee,
Wisbech.
Eyes don't have it!
In response to David Silver’s assessment of Jeremy Corbyn by looking at ‘the coldness in his eyes’ during the Andrew Neil interview, ‘matched only by an emotionless and equally cold voice and cold intent’ is really scraping the bottom of the barrel.
Some people unfortunately do not come across as ‘great guys’ on camera because, to amend a phrase that has often been used, ‘the camera DOESN’T love them’, however earnest and truthful they are. John Major suffered the same disadvantage but I know that, in person, he was a force to be reckoned with.
Some, obviously the likes of Boris Johnson, may have the advantage that ‘the camera DOES love him’ – BUT, he consistently blames other people for everything that he thinks is going wrong, he ‘ducks and dives’, and, by the way, Andrew Neil, as of Thursday evening, December 5, is STILL waiting for Mr Johnson to have the courage to face him on TV.
What does that tell you about Boris Johnson, Mr Silver? It sure says a lot about Jeremy Corbyn, who DID have the guts to face Mr Neil.
Carole Ransom,
via email.
