Why do we host the Tory Party in our city?
ASIDE from the multi-millionaire Conservative Party supporter Gary Barlow, does anyone actually welcome the Tory Party conference here in the north west?
It is in Manchester, at huge cost in security and staging and at major disruption to the city!
This is the party that has severely cut education, the NHS, children’s and adults services.
They’ve made huge cuts in the armed forces and police services. The transport network is a shambles, peak time train carriages are a joke with overcrowding(that’s if the train actually turns up),the cost of living is getting higher and higher, but people’s wages are standing still, so a lot of people are finding it tough to make ends meet.
In seven years, what have they done?
This Northern Powerhouse soundbite. Does it mean anything? Really?
I’m a cleaner. What’s that going to do for me? How’s that going to help a supermarket worker? A paramedic?
It’s too easy for them to keep blaming the previous Labour government for every problem.
And as far as Brexit goes, they are using that as a smokescreen to mask what is happening here, right now. Which is nothing.
They are doing nothing for everyday, normal, hardworking folk in and around Manchester nothing.
So, I ask again: Does anyone actually want the Conservative party conference here? Rich Snowdon, Astley Bridge
Bad prison is a deterrent
AFTER reading about the conditions in Strangeways prison, I was surprised that seemingly up to 1,167 prisoners are content to reside there.
I would have thought that these conditions would be enough to keep them on the right side of the law. Alan Crawford Leyland, Lancashire
We ARE going out of the EU
A total of 17.4 million people, the largest vote in the UKs electoral history for any one proposition (or for that matter any political party) voted to leave the European Union last year. It is the decision of these people that Bren Urmston, (Viewpoints, September 28) wants to undermine. However, the arguments are manipulated they cannot change this fact – the UK is leaving the EU.
The EU is behaving as if our country was a colony in a European Empire controlled by unelected commissioners in Brussels.
We should assert ourselves as an independent democracy as soon as possible.
This means repealing the 1972 Act which took us in to the EU. This is the purpose of the EU (Withdrawal) Bill.
It is true that this Bill contains so called Henry VIII Clauses but so do the vast majority of our laws.
In this case too much power is being transferred to our Government (although this is better than leaving it to the Brussels bureaucrats), I am sure as anyone can be in the current political circumstances that these clauses will be improved.
Every arrogant statement from these latter-day European Imperialists show how right we were to vote leave. Graham Stringer, MP for Blackley and Broughton
Poor morals of consumers
I ATTENDED the Our Faith, Our Planet, Our Community gathering referred to in Viewpoints on Thursday.
It had some radical ideas and revelations, but seemed very relaxed with little sense of urgency - nothing to scare the horses - as long as they aren’t listening.
It was concerning that the Manchester councillor seemed out of his depth and groping for worthy events and people to name-drop.
It appears that after some years of talking the talk, the council has done nothing really fundamental to report to offset its enthusiasm for air travel expansion and shopping growth.
Like Wilkins Micawber it comes across as waiting for something to turn up.
Living where I do I find the blind, mindless and wasteful depletion of the world’s materials evidenced in the litter and dustbins of Manchester sinful and depressing.
But that’s not the whole story as there were radical messages as well.
Bishop John Arnold, from Salford, gave a thought-provoking introduction to Pope Frances’ encyclical Laudato Si- spiritual writing at it’s most exciting and open- nothing like the threat of eternal punishment for bad behaviour your correspondent Mark Hudson expected.
Noting that the microphone being used probably came all the way from China, we were encouraged to seriously cut down our consumerism - eg rejecting the culture of wear once clothes.
We were also called to go beyond recycling to a complete dedication to “respect, reverence, restraint, redistribution, responsibility, renewal and repentance”.
You don’t have to be a religious person practicing your religion to take this to heart and to see such radical “missionary discipleship” will achieve much more than (just) filling the bottle bank, necessary as that is. Name withheld, Manchester