Hear All Sides

MINERS' PENSIONS

THE scale of the Treasury windfall from the miners' pension fund surpluses shocked many miners, ex-miners and their families in the North-East when it emerged last year.

But the rake-off goes on. In the past year alone, another £1bn has been earmarked for the Treasury. That adds up to around £5bn so far.

The Treasury gets this money because of a 1994 agreement brokered by the previous Conservative government. The deal was that in exchange for guaranteeing pension increases in line with inflation, the Treasury could take up to 50 per cent of any surpluses. This is far too much when the risk is so small and many retired miners and their widows continue to exist on the edges of poverty.

We have just had four years of Labour government and nothing has yet been done to address this injustice. There can be no justification for continuing to take such huge sums from the fund surpluses year on year.

If you are one of the 500,000 members of the coal industry schemes your help is needed once again to bring pressure to bear.

Most coalfield MPs already support this campaign but you can help strengthen their resolve by dropping them a line. - Coun Terry O'Neill, Chairman, Miners Pension Campaign Committee.

DEATH PENALTY

OF course bleeding-heart liberals are outraged by the death penalty - and so am I. For it's an act of premeditated violence. But what Timothy McVeigh did to those lovely children deserved nothing less than capital punishment, and in the end justice was done.

David Blunkett should grasp the nettle and ensure the next British mass killer is relieved of his wretched and demonic existence.

But he won't of course, for the simple reason he's too imbued with political decadence.

It is precisely because the authorities have failed to punish decades of homicide in this country that it is now beginning to reach epidemic proportions. - Aled Jones, Bridlington.

LIFE AND DEATH

EA Moralee laments the rise in secular funerals and that people now take a rational view that death is the end of life (Echo July 6).

She may believe otherwise, but where is the evidence that part of us lives on?

It is surely wishful thinking. How can we live on after death and where do we do so? Two thousand years ago man's knowledge of the universe was extremely limited and it was easy to suggest that Heaven was somewhere overhead and Hell down below, but present day churchmen have to use phrases such as "Beyond space and time", which is not very meaningful.

Could EA Moralee suggest where and how we could live on in the light of our present knowledge? - Eric Gendle, Middlesbrough.

MEDICAL CHECKS

WHILE I largely agree with your Comment column (Echo, Jul 5) about medical checks on disabled people, what strikes me about the Government's announcement is that it was not foreshadowed before or during the election campaign and so it can be interpreted as sharp practice if not out-and-out deception.

One wonders what other unpalatable policies Government has up its sleeve and which have so far been hidden because of political expediency.

It is just this sort of underhand way of governing, not far removed from dishonesty and which fails to be open with the general public, that makes people cynical about governments and politicians in general.

No wonder more and more people take the view that they are helpless when ministers take decisions of this sort without apparently consulting public opinion and the organisations who look after the interests of the groups to be affected.

So why bother to vote? Governments will always do what they want willy-nilly and use the argument for doing so that they were democratically elected. This is just what apathy feeds upon. - RK Bradley, Darlington.

I READ with regret that the Darling/Blair purge is once again to be wreaked on the sick and the disabled.

I do not need to be clairvoyant to reveal that they are well aware that our general practitioners are so bogged down with bureaucracy overload that the crucial ten minutes of decision will once again be taken away from them and mass examinations will be taken on Benefit Agencies premises as done in the past.

They tell us that they have 2,300,000 receiving disability benefit and they want it reduced to 590,000 so they are looking for a cut of 1,710,000 to meet their 70 per cent target, quite a large cull indeed.

There will be a great percentage of those demoted who will only qualify for sedentary jobs due to their acute health disabilities and the onus of finding employment is usually left to themselves which is so difficult as employers must keep within their guidelines while also maintaining a workforce of merit.

As Dennis Skinner states, leave the sick and disabled alone. Being a pensioner, I am just recovering from my 75p increase syndrome. - William Taylor, New Brancepeth, Durham.

GOOD SHOW

I write to advise the residents of Darlington that this superb production of The Borrowers, by Chris Wallis, is due in your town next week.

Having had the good fortune to see a really wonderful performance by the small cast at the York Grand Opera House last Wednesday, I must say,

never have I witnessed such an attentive audience, held spellbound with interest, throughout the two hours ten minutes of this unique presentation of Mary Norton's book, adapted by Charles Way and directed by Roger Haines.

In particular, young children watched and listened intently. It was really pleasant to be in the audience with my 16-year-old lad and two of his friends, who all thoroughly enjoyed the show.

To all in Darlington, this is a chance for the whole family to see something very different and enjoyably unforgettable. - Jack Davie, Whitby.

l This letter was run in yesterday's Northern Echo but omitted to name the production. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.