This only sounds good
GREG Clark is a Middlesbroughborn man who is government minster for levelling up. He has announced a new tier of government to be imposed on North Yorkshire – this will be led by a new mayor with all the officers and hangers-on who will be from the local Conservative offices, pretty much like Cleveland’s mayor.
The budget will be £540 million over 30 years or £18 million per year or under £10 per head per year to put in plain English.
This goes against all Conservative phi- losophy, which is small government and low taxes.
The government’s big idea sounds good but in practice all monies lead to London and with a population of ten million that’s where the money stays.
ANDREW STEPHENSON, Elton
History will deliver the knock-out blow
GEOFF Green (Feedback 26/07/22) spins a familiar fairy story about Johnson’s legacy as PM in a light-hearted extended boxing metaphor. The truth is more brutal though and history will deliver a knock-out blow to the Johnsonian era record.
He leaves Downing Street under a cloud of disgrace, paid-for flat renovations and holidays, fined by the police for breaking his own rules and facing a charge of wilfully misleading the House of Commons.
And the charge sheet of allowing the egregious rule-breaking and poor conduct in public office of people like Patel, Patterson, Jenrick, Cummings and others in his team will be how history judges his tawdry tenure in No 10 Downing Street.
He desperately wanted the job of PM so people bemoaning the hand he was dealt and dealing well with Brexit, Covid-19 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a travesty of the truth. This was a man who spent his career ducking responsibility and was confronted by a challenge that could not be run from.
The cavalier approach towards the emergence of the virus, the delay in introducing control measures is estimated to have cost 20,000 unnecessary deaths. Then there was the debacle surrounding PPE contracts, the “VIP” lane that wasted billions but filled the coffers of close friends and allies.
As for the Putin threat, well his fraternising with people like Lebedev and other Russian oligarchs will always be on the historical record. And Brexit wasn’t an oven-ready deal but a halfbaked shambles.
TONY JOHNSTONE, Eston
I had hoped my MP would go sooner
I WAS disappointed when my MP, Alex Cunningham, announced he would be retiring from Parliament at the next election. I had hoped that he would have stepped down at the last election after he had betrayed the overwhelming wishes of his constituents.
After his recent comments about the “folly” in North Tees Health Trust possibly amalgamating with the financially crippled South Tees Trust, he failed to mention that the Labour Party and the Blair/Brown governments are totally responsible for the debts accrued by South Tees Trust through their Private Finance Initiative, currently estimated to be costing the South Tees Trust £52million each year.
Before and after his election in 2010 he was vehement in his criticism of the incoming Conservative government for not using the PFI to build a new hospital at Wynyard. What state would the North Tees Trust finances been in if Cunningham had had his way?
TONY MAXWELL, Billingham