10/06/03

As a former head of Avenue Comprehensive School in Newton Aycliffe, I can sympathise with all w ho will be affected. From about 1979 until the final closure of the Avenue in July 1992, there were several attempts to close the school for all the usual reasons. During those years, we faced lowering morale and much anxiety, plus unpleasant clashes with those in authority; there was, however, some success in keeping the school open, but under threat for some years.

My surprise and dismay can be understood when I read that in my home town of Spennymoor, no fewer than three schools are in the closure list - Kirk Merrington, Rosa Street and King Street primaries. The former two schools have no surplus, so their conditions and accommodation must be unsatisfactory.

Many of us would question this, but my advice to those who are attached to these schools would be to prepare as soon as possible, with the aid of experts if necessary, a good case for retaining their schools and to put up a good fight if the worst happens.

I am sad that I have not experienced in my career or my retirement the bold forward step by any government to reduce once and for all the size of every class in schools to 20, which would equate the state schools with the more fortunate independent schools and thus avoid the need to close so many well-run schools.

We all know, of course, that such a step would cost money. This country of ours has the money, as events in the past year or so have proved. - Joseph Prest, Spennymoor.

AT a time when Durham County Council is looking to close 23 schools, councillors look set to vote themselves a 13 per cent pay rise in what can only be described as an act of breathtaking insensitivity.

Council leader Ken Manton justifies the proposed rise as an attempt to attract more people into local government. I would respectfully suggest that bribing people to put themselves forward for election is not the remit of a council leader.

Far better he gets off the gravy train, stands on the platform, and focuses on what happens when a council behaves like "the untouchables." Look down the line at Durham City Council, where we electors unceremoniously booted out the Labour majority once it decided it was more important than those it purported to represent. - Paul Tomaney, Neville's Cross.

EMILY DAVISON

IN the feature on Emily Davison (Echo, June 4) it is stated that some of her followers thought her intention was 'to pin the suffragette colours to the horse'.

This seems unlikely given that a racehorse weighs half a ton and travels at around 35 mph during a race. - Martin Birtle, Billingham.

IRAQ

SADDAM'S regime has been removed, Americans have cheaper fuel and American museums have new items to exhibit, but at what cost?

Presently there is a humanitarian crisis in southern Iraq which is fuelling anti-American and British feeling.

International law and the UN is now meaningless, whilst the term "war on terror" is now an excuse to silence protestors, to deny people their human and civil rights, to arrest and imprison without charge or trial any opposition or pro-democracy movements, to justify the committing of atrocity upon atrocity, while making the human rights conventions worthless and giving terrorists the validity they would never have otherwise.

But aren't these the very things the anti-war protestors were warning us about? - CT Riley, Spennymoor.

THE removal of Saddam, however welcome, cannot retrospectively justify the war.

Outside intervention to help liberate the Iraqi people may have been necessary in the end; but the question is whether every reasonable effort had been made to save lives and find alternatives, eg by allowing Hans Blix to complete his task, and by deploying human rights monitors in Iraq, as demanded by the UN and Amnesty International.

The decision to invade was taken as soon as the US and Britain began sending troops to the Gulf.

With the approaching Iraqi summer, keeping them on standby any longer would have been expensive and demoralising; bringing them home even more so.

There were also the US mid-term elections to consider.

At this stage, attacking Iraq purely to achieve "regime change" was legally and morally unjustifiable.

It was therefore necessary to exaggerate the threat to the West by inventing a link with al Qaida, to fit with the new American concept of "pre-emptive self-defence", and by fabricating evidence of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. - Pete Winstanley, Durham.

EUROPE

OUR Government is guilty of treason. They will sign the European Constitution, thereby confirming what we have all known for 30 years, that the EU is nothing but the political union of Europe, and the destruction of nation states.

And yet recent polls show around 85 per cent of people want to vote on this, and over 50 per cent would rather leave the EU than transfer any more powers to the EU as this clearly would. - Jamie Mash, UK Independence Party, Northallerton.