Letters

DOES the BBC really have to screen Robbie Williams pulling down his trousers and thrusting himself towards the camera (Echo, Aug 8)? Surely there is enough sex and demonstrations of low moral standards on our TVs already without deliberately showing more.

Mr Williams's reported actions can hardly be claimed to be a vital or necessary part of putting across his song. The BBC should think again, remembering the audience for Top of the Pops is mainly impressionable teenagers and young people. Do they really need to see this indecent act? - EA Moralee, Billingham.

YUGOSLAVIA

I WISH to express a different opinion to A Featherstone (HAS, Aug 9) on Yugoslavia.

It is easy to criticise the Nato campaign from the comfort and safety of a home in the North of England far away from the Serbian death squads and ethnic cleansers.

Amnesty International, of which I am a member, is right to police all governments and to speak out whenever necessary but they know who the real war criminals are in this conflict - Milosovic and his henchmen.

Most ordinary people I have spoken to agree that a Nato bombing campaign was correct in order to rid Kosovo of its invaders and save as many of the native inhabitants as possible.

Milosovic was warned of this action but chose not to withdraw his forces. Therefore all loss of life in this conflict is his responsibility.

A land-based war would have lost many Nato lives and to have taken no action would have led to the displacement of a race of people or worse.

Tangible gain can be seen from the returning Kosovo people, although there will be few who will return unscathed. - M Walton, Barnard Castle.

VANDALISM

WITH the news that the HSBC Bank in Darlington town centre has closed its all-night service lobby due to repeated acts of vandalism, we may wonder yet again why society tolerates these hooligans.

In this case the vandals ignored the video cameras which identified them - many of them are known to police anyway.

What is very clear is that any action taken against them is failing to deter them. Amid all this talk of zero tolerance should we really regard vandalism as something we have to live with, like the weather? - Bob Jarratt, Richmond.

ASYLUM SEEKERS

JOHN Seacroft (HAS, Aug 21) is way off the truth regarding his views on what he calls asylum seekers who, in reality, are 98 per cent illegal immigrants and who are costing our tax payers millions of pounds in benefits.

Does he not realise that certain people have and are making a lot of money from getting these immigrants into Britain to the detriment of our own people, ie invalid miners awaiting compensation, our own people who have worked and paid taxes and have fallen on hard times. - F Wealands, Darlington.

EUROPE

HAVING spent some time canvassing for the UK Independence Party recently, I am driven to the conclusion that the majority of people have simply no idea of what is taking place in their name.

And the majority of those who do have some idea display an attitude of abject defeatism and demoralisation.

In fairness, they are quite ignorant that their leader Tony Blair has already given away their country's right from under their noses and is now all set to deliver us into and under the extremely radical and sophisticated (but nevertheless fascist) bureaucratic bondage of the European superstate when he signs on our behalf the Treaty of Nice, in France in December.

It seems that unless our MPs stop him, our Labour leader is selling us up the Rhine and we can forget any referendum. - Alan Rook, Newcastle.

POVERTY

LET'S face it, if we ignore our pretensions and our class (this especially applies to the middle class), the quality of life for your average punter is still abysmally low. Yes, there's no grinding poverty now but, compared to the rest of us, the poor have a pretty hard time of it.

They probably find it hard to pay for dental treatment, prescriptions, and most of all, decent and nutritious food for their children.

Instead of having so much sympathy (and money) for asylum seekers, the Government should be thinking more about our poor.

Depressingly, no government wants to eradicate poverty - you're fooling yourself if you think it will - because the rich will always live off the backs of the poor. - Ken Jackson, Northallerton.

HOMELESSNESS

IN yet another example of this Labour Government's failure to act in line with election rhetoric, we see the North-East missing out on funding for the homeless.

Tony Blair promised an increase in affordable rented housing, yet we have seen a nationwide decline in the amount of social housing constructed under this Government.

John Prescott has overseen a fall in total expenditure on housing (1997-98 to 2000-01) of £5bn and the Labour intention of filling up empty council houses can not really be taken seriously when we see it is Labour councils that have the worst record for houses remaining empty.

The report (Echo, Aug 23) concerning lack of Government funding for the homeless in the North-East is just another example of Labour's tactic of promising much but delivering little.

Genuine compassionate politics is revealed by what you actually do, not just by what you say. - Martin Callanan MEP, Conservative, North-East Region.

TRANSPORT

THE Government seems determined to force the motorist off the road with highly-taxed fuel, high road tax and spiraling insurance.

The question is what will they do if they succeed?

The solution is to use a fraction more of the billions of pounds that the motorist stumps up to improve the roads to motorway standard.

After all, most of them were constructed for horse-drawn vehicles, not for owners of two Jags. - E Reynolds, Wheatley Hill.