20/01/05

He states that unemployment in our country in the last 20 years has decreased from 20 per cent to two per cent and that major investment in local economic regeneration has ensured County Durham is well placed to benefit from a sustained period of national economic growth.

The fact is the unemployed have simply been moved: many claiming disability allowance who are as fit as I am.

Others are on cheap labour schemes and many others find living off the state is more profitable than working.

Young people leave school at 16 and, by the time they are 19, are still claiming a mere pittance of £40-a-week.

We have a Government which went to war in Iraq so it could keep itself in power by borrowing huge sums of money from the Americans, and a Chancellor who throws money around like confetti while bleeding the private industries to death.

We have an economy just about in recession and which, in the not too distant future, will be as dead as the dodo.

Our council tax nearly doubled in the last seven years, while our bureaucrats give themselves rises that are nothing more than a disgrace.

Come and see what is happening on the estate where I live and see what the bureaucrats are doing for us. - John Young, Crook.

EVOLUTION

ERIC Gendle (HAS, Jan 15) makes a convincing case for the origin of drug resistant strains of bacteria and breeds of dog on the basis of national and artificial selection, respectively.

However, we are discussing not strains and breeds - ie 'races' to put it crudely - but species, a much more fundamental category involving major genetic difference that cannot be accounted for by selective processes. Some other mechanism must be at work though what it is, is at this stage anybody's guess.

This being the case, the confident regularity with which atheist biologists trot out the theories of Charles Darwin and Richard Dawkins is entirely misplaced.

My own view is that we are here approaching an area that is probably permanently off limits to science; and that the nearest we can ever hope to come to the truth is by having the basic humility to think of Nature in all its wonderful variety in terms of the limitless creative love of God, ie the Holy Spirit. Veni creator spiritu. - T Kelly, Crook.

ROYAL FAMILY

BRAVO to Nick Morrison for his article on Harry and the Royals in general.

The excuse by the soft-in-the-head brigade is that he is just a young lad with a lot to learn.

Most certainly he has a lot to learn, but he has a lot of catching up to do. If our Royals are not reasonable role models for us peasants, then what use are they?

Philip, Anne, Andrew, Edward, Charles, William and Harry have not set the rest of us much of an example. I think the Queen deserves a lot of sympathy, trying to keep that lot in order.

Unfortunately, we are stuck with them for the foreseeable future and their lifestyle will continue to upset working people.

As a republican, I will never be convinced the Royals contribute anything worthwhile to our country.

Likewise with the House of Lords. The very name is anathema to many and what we need is a constitutional revolution.

I won't see it, but I am sure it will come about one day, hopefully sooner than later. - Hugh Pender, Darlington.

BY dressing up as a Nazi and wearing the swastika emblem on his arm, young Prince Harry has truly put his foot in it.

Although he did this at a party and the occasion was meant to be jolly, his actions nevertheless have caused great offence.

The timing of it, too, could not have been worse as attention is centred on the liberation of Auschwitz 60 years ago.

Hopes of a public apology, however, can be dismissed as this would only serve to humiliate the boy.

I believe it is fair to say, though, that the prince appears to have been badly advised for surely everyone knows that what the Nazis did was extraordinary.

As a young man of 19, Prince Harry must now look to the future and do all that he can to put this episode behind him. - LD Wilson, Guisborough.

TAXATION

THE Conservatives are offering four per cent in tax cuts, among other things, which, when all put into one bag, means the Conservatives are going to see their bank manager for a bank loan. The bank manager will look Michael Howard straight in the eye and say: "But do you really intend to carry out these policies?"

In other words, the bank manager would say no to the Conservatives' bank loan, which is just what veteran MP Robert Jackson has said to the Conservatives. He has suddenly seen the light as he now believes that Tony Blair would make the best Prime Minister. He now believes in Labour policies which are to spend a lot of money on public services, which benefit the majority of the population, not the rich few.

Most of us need the National Health Service, which was a Labour invention in 1944, as only the privileged few are able to afford to pay for medical insurance.

Labour will provide more police officers, more local authority schools and teachers and, since Labour came to power, we have a higher percentage of O and A-level passes. Mental hospitals, which closed down under the Tory government as the Tories could not afford to run them, have all now reopened under better conditions under a Labour government.

So if Labour can afford to run extra schools and hospitals which benefit the majority, why can't the Conservatives?

What this means is that it does not matter how many times the Conservatives change their party leader to try and win an election, they never will as the majority are not interested in Conservative policies. - Margaret A Greenhalgh, Darlington.

PUB HOURS

REFERENCE the recent controversial decision made by the Labour Government to introduce 24-hour opening for licensed premises, this is the same Labour Government which has just published a Department of Health White Paper entitled Choosing Health-Making Healthy Choices.

Within this paper is a section entitled Encouraging and Supporting Sensible Drinking. It states alcohol misuse is associated with deaths from stroke, cancer, liver disease, injury and suicide and places an unacceptable burden on the NHS, particularly on accident and emergency departments, and is related to absenteeism, domestic violence and violent crime.

So what is this Labour Government's cavalier response to its own health white paper? "Yippee, let's have 24-hour opening for pubs and clubs, let the people drink themselves to death. Who cares about liver disease and domestic violence?"

Clearly this Government's new licensing laws are a complete mess and are to the advantage of only those who are out to make a profit from others' misery. - J Pickersgill, Independent Councillor, Chair of Derwentside Health Scrutiny Committee.