We will all be the losers in a Europe that is not united
LAST June I and over half of Stockport voted to remain in the European Union.
In a national contest we were, of course, the losers.
I sometimes think I could make a career out of being a loser.
In the nineties, as an Independent, I lost three elections.
I had to put my leaflets out on my own and, over the course of three weeks, wore my trainers out and half the skin in the soles of my feet.
In the first of these elections the Lib Dem candidate Mark Hunter was the clear winner.
People may have been winding me up at the time, but I was told that Mark counted on as many as 200 women to help put his leaflets out.
Mr Hunter went on to become leader of the town’s Liberal Democrats, leader of Stockport Council, a member of Parliament and a member of the Coalition cabinet.
Helpers or no helpers, he is clearly a winner.
All of Stockport’s ‘remainers’ today probably feel like losers with a capital ‘L.’
On issues of a united Europe and reining in our decadent car culture, I am, as ever, on losing sides.
Could it be, though, that the peace and stability of Europe and the future of our planet go beyond all notions of winning and losing.
It seems to me that, on these two overriding issues, the fate of all of us is sealed.
So I try to be philosophical about all of this winning and losing.
I try not to be a little loser, but the jealous side of my nature kills me to know how Mark got 200 women to voluntarily do his leafleting all those years ago. How does he do it? I wouldn’t care, but I’m better looking than him.
If you don’t believe me, just ask Debbie Harry. John Tyers Marple
MAKING A MESS OF THE PLANET
EXPERTS are constantly telling us how wildlife is becoming extinct due to climate change. That’s not exactly true.
Yes, humans are to blame for digging up their habitats to build roads, houses and new towns, giving the animals no choice but to either move on or die out and if it’s not this then we are hunting them to extinction.
Everything has a right to a home, everything has a right to life but we are so arrogant we think wrongly that we have some given right to destroy, kill and do just as we please.
Why do we want to inhabit other planets when we are making such a mess of the one we already have?
Climate change is just another excuse to cover our actions, our climate has been changing since time began and will continue to change no matter what we do. Russell Hobbs High Lane
MENTAL ILLNESS NOT THE CAUSE
WE expect the police to look after us and we have got to look after the police but that doesn’t mean that a policeman’s wife can just generalise about mental illness.
I am referring to Christine Fulton on news 24, programme 601, in the morning of Sunday, April 9- her husband was murdered 15 years ago in Scotland and she said, ‘it was by a schizophrenic’, as though that explained everything.
If she was to make such a statement about any other minority, vulnerable group, for example to say about an extremist ‘it was done by an Asian’, she would soon be stopped.
Violence isn’t a symptom of schizophrenia, it is only the worse cases that reach the papers and when one of them is, it is nearly always that they were on alcohol or drugs and it is the alcohol that has done it and nothing else.
A schizophrenic is very often just someone that is very quite and withdrawn, they get attacked more often than they attack someone else and if this kind of remark made about them was merely insulting it wouldn’t matter nearly so much but it is a lot more than that. It’s dangerous, it’s making them vulnerable.
Was this man who killed her husband a schizophrenic?
Did a psychiatrist say so or was Christine Fulton just using it for another word for a looney, psycho, something that I have heard many times before.
Even if it was a diagnosis made by a psychiatrist another may not have agreed, it can cover such a wide range of things and psychiatrists can vary so much in opinion. Relative of schizophrenic Stockport