Vote-chasing parties should not mess with pensioners
I KNOW everyone will be listening to the policies of all of the parties during the election process, but the policy I am following is the one regarding state pensions.
All parties seem intent on scrapping the triple lock on state pensions which guarantees that pensions keep up with inflation.
These are people who worked all their lives and paid their National Insurance and their income tax and brought up families and have to live on a state pension which is less than £9.000 per year.
This is while the Government supports people who have never worked, never paid National Insurance and never paid income tax and have child after child after child and get well in excess of £15,000 in taxpayers’ money.
They are the takers while the pensioners are the GIVERS.
I tell all the parties who are after votes, don’t mess with pensioners, some of them lived through the Second World War. Brian McDonald Milnrow ROBIN Parker’s attempt to justify the continued existence of the College Bank flats (Saturday’s letters) will just not wash.
They may well have been as a result of Westminster policy, but that does not mean the policy was right. Like the bedroom tax, for example. My knowledge of development policies during those years my be scant, but I do know it was the French who first came up the idea of high-rise council developments in the late 50s.
I was living there at the time and saw them spring up on the outskirts (never in the centre) of Paris and other major cities.
But it didn’t take too many years for planners and local authorities over there to realise a mistake had been made.
By then, unfortunately, councils in Britain had already started following the example set by France.
Mercifully, the blunder realisation quickly crossed the Channel and, thankfully, the building of high-rise abominations stopped.
Indeed many of them were demolished after being in existence for less than 20 years. Some policy.
Improvements to the Seven Sisters may have taken place since I was a resident, long before Mr Parker, but however nice and comfortable they may be inside, there cannot be any denial of the fact that their ugly external appearance ruins the town’s otherwise quite exceptional centre. Ian Ogden Whitworth