Levelling up cash coming?
I WOULD like to ask Jacob Young MP: As you wrote to Mr Johnson asking him to step down and that you could not support him, citing in your letter printed in The Gazette (08.07.22) that he was no longer listening and acting in the national interest i.e. bringing the party and office of Prime Minister into disrepute, which has been extolled by your party, along with all the opposition in parliament over the past many months, does he then agree that it is time these ethics and standards should be held to account also in local government?
Mr Young had been working in the government’s Department for Levelling Up, a very important issue for the people of the North East.
Is this Levelling Up funding still to come to our area (i.e. Eston Precinct and Eston Swimming Baths), which is a priority for the voters including the “Red Wall” voters here?
Was the deal done before your resigned a week ago, or is it still on the negotiating table?
What is the devil in the detail? This area has been the brunt of too many political letdowns since 1984 (starting with the closure of Smith’s Dock Shipbuilding and Shell refinery).
We expect nothing but honest and open dialogue here, which we all hope will come for the regeneration of our so-called Greater Eston Area.
The people of this country are greatly concerned with the crisis and turmoil the country is now facing, feeling like we are heading for a recession, but the politicians, no matter what side they sit in parliament, have been squabbling for months like children with only one agenda, while the people and country are suffering terrible hardships.
Many of these certainly don’t have to worry or have a clue what it means to have to decide whether to eat or keep warm.
My mother always said: “Be careful what you wish for.”
ANN HIGGINS,
Normanby
Johnson was author of own his demise
READING Tony Maxwell’s breathless, fallacious defence of disgraced Boris Johnson’s record as PM (Friend of the people or man child, The Gazette 11.07.22) and the angry denunciation of those dastardly conspirators against him, including the Tory media, led by the BBC, is risible in the extreme.
This stuff is plucked out of the pages of Alice in Wonderland.
And to say it is a plot by Remainers ignores the fact there were more than a record 50 resignations where you would be lucky to find any Remainers, and no chance of one replacing him.
The absolute truth is that Johnson is the author of his own demise, the culmination of three years of shocking scandal and misrule.
Meaningless memes like this and references to BBC bias are extremely subjective, if for no other reason than those of us on the left of UK politics think the BBC is frit of this right-wing Government and bias toward them.
As for Johnson’s so-called achievements, the fact is Brexit wasn’t “oven ready” but halfbaked and proving a disaster, as was the handling of the pandemic with 181,000 deaths – a higher rate than France, Germany, Italy, Spain and most of the EU.
TONY JOHNSTONE,
Eston
Leadership contest ‘is a sham vote’
IT matters not one iota who wins the sham vote for the role of Prime Minister.
The one certainty to come from it is that whoever wins is a backstabber.
The only way they could possibly get to No. 10 was to oust the incumbent.
They will never have been voted in by the country – and they will be out at the next election.
The horrible thought, at the end of the day, is that a union lover and EU lover will be at the head of our government again after the next election, and that does not bear thinking about at all.
Things are bad enough now, and they can only get worse with Labour in charge.
Nothing we can do but suffer the inevitable.
IAN THREADGILL,
Billingham
IF we were asked to name a famous telescope, most of us could probably only come up with the Hubble.
But NASA has recently unveiled a shiny new piece of kit, which makes Hubble look as outdated as a minidisc player. In fact, it’s a hundred times more powerful than its predecessor and the largest telescope ever built. It’s described by one contributor as ‘Hubble on steroids’.
This one-off documentary displays the first images from the fancy James Webb Space Telescope, which promises to
provide glimpses of previously unreachable galaxies.
Not only can it look back in time to the birth of the first stars, there’s also hope that this telescope might be able to spot alien life on other planets too, helping us rediscover our own universe. But such an advanced piece of machinery doesn’t come cheap – more than £8 billion was spent on it, which is the heftiest price tag for any scientific instrument ever built, and 20 years of work has gone into it.
Tonight, we’ll see the blood, sweat and tears poured into making it a reality since the late 1980s, and will come to understand why scientists and astronomers believe it’s really worth such a huge investment.
Plus, we’ll get an insight into the incredible feat of engineering that made this the first telescope to unfold in space.
The unfolding takes two weeks, relies on 178 different devices (none of which can fail) and involves a sunshield the size of a tennis court.