Budget fails to address our pensions injustice

ANOTHER Budget another kick in the teeth for ASW pensioners and those in the Financial Assistance Scheme (FAS), by keep stitching them up Chancellor Sunak.

As UK governments know we were told our pensions were protected and 100% safe, yet UK ministers to this day are still morally corrupt in denying these innocent victims the pensions they so rightfully deserve in full.

Prime ministers, chancellors and other ministers proudly tell the country no one should be punished for doing the right thing, yet they have always reneged on this promise to us in the FAS – gaslighting at its very best.

We at ASW say to Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunak and Pensions Minister Guy Opperman: if you had an ounce of moral decency in your bodies you would finally end this inhumane pension injustice and pay these pensions in full, 100%.

These families have suffered long enough.

John Benson

Dinas Powys

Language obsession is failing the poorest

ANY pretence that Welsh Labour had not been infiltrated and dominated by Welsh-speaking nationalists has dissipated by the restating of the pursuit of independence by the former fifth columnist Mark Drakeford.

He and his kind knew the only way to power in Wales was via the Labour Party, which has dominated Welsh politics for a century. They have transformed Labour in Wales from the party which sought to raise the working class from poverty and deprivation into subjugating them under a cultural elite.

His breaking cover in the pursuit of independence is a bold attempt to garner more power into the hands of this minority nationalist cabal.

Welsh-speaking Rhianwen Daniel who is researching national identity and linguistic relativity at Cardiff University, wrote a brave and perceptive article recently, stating “regarding the composition of the Welsh parliament, according to a 2017 think-tank Gorwel, only 16% of all members since 1998 came from the private sector, with 44 % having previously been councillors. Not only is this entirely unrepresentative of the Welsh electorate; it also suggests that parliament members lack the business insight to make reliable strategic decisions about Welsh economic matters.” Drakeford is fully aware of this, that’s why he wants his Welsh-language cultural utopia financed by English money from the Treasury.

She adds: “The Welsh Language Act has encouraged the culture of cronyism and groupthink that now characterises much of Wales’ public and government grant-dependent sectors. The act has done so because it stipulated that all public bodies in Wales provide their services in Welsh as well as in English. This meant that the pool of talent from which public bodies drew was considerably more shallow than before, focused as it was on those who could speak Welsh.”

In so doing Welsh Labour is denying employment to the most deprived, the very people they are supposed to be representing. Dennis Coughlin

Llandaff, Cardiff

A slap in the face for most vulnerable

SO, Rishi Sunak once again gives away £20 a week to those on Universal Credit and helps out his business pals but yet again neglects those on JSA and ESA for the extra support.

They have to live through the pandemic too, you know. What a slap in the face to some of the most vulnerable in society.

Shame on you, Sunak, and shame on Boris too for backing him. They won’t be using food banks to survive, will they. They will probably spend more on coffee lunches than some do on grocery shopping. Geoffrey Brooking

Havant,

Hampshire

Advice on masks let us down badly

NEVILLE Westerman was quite right to point out the lax response of this government’s health officers in the handling of the virus pandemic (“Our lax response to virus outbreak”, Echo letters, March 3). It was a pitiful response by government ministers and health officers to what soon became a national emergency.

Taiwan, in particular, immediately took over manufacturing factories to produce masks for its populace; and was soon producing three masks a week for its entire population of 23 million people. This rapid action has led to an astounding success: only nine deaths in the past 14 months.

Why, you may well ask, has Taiwan achieved such success? It is because Taiwan’s health officers acted with alacrity and instructed its population that masks offered protection and must always be worn.

In comparison, what have the UK’s health advisors said from the beginning of this pandemic? I will only quote one, though there must be at least a hundred, and that is Chris Whitty, who said so many times, from January to August, that masks were ineffective. Well tell that to the relatives of the 128,000 people who have died, including countless pensioners in their care homes.

It must also be taken into consideration that at the time of the 1919 pandemic, the medical profession discovered that masks had to be non-porous to give good protection; so, our medical advisers, along with our governments, have had more than 100 years to devise good lifesaving masks, masks that may have saved very many vulnerable people.

The ineptitude with which this pandemic has been handled begs the questions: why are those who failed the National Health Service so badly still in the positions they have shown not to be worthy of? And why have our parliamentary representatives allowed them to get away with it?

And to finish off, at a time when another lockdown is coming to its end, people are now about to pour out on to the streets and parks in large numbers and we find that there is no mandatory instruction to always wear masks until the plague has passed.

Where these leaders come from is debatable. However, one thing is certain, they are not working towards the saving of the United Kingdom’s economy, that now stands on the edge of the abyss. George Chelmis

Cardiff

He wants his Welshlanguage cultural utopia financed by English money from the Treasury

Dennis Coughlin Llandaff

Walk tall towards independence

THE Labour Party likes to remind the people of Wales that it was they who gave us the NHS and Welsh devolution.

Sounded good in 1999 but the country has moved on and this spin sounds a bit dated. Just like Labour’s party policies are outdated and not fit for purpose in modern Wales. With so many right-wing parties wanting to turn back Welsh democracy, Labour sits on the fence.

Labour is crawling Wales to independence on its belly. Get up onto your feet and walk tall and proud towards independence.

Andrew Nutt Bargoed