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are currently expected, plus the querying of 30% Chinese investment and its future role, and EDF’s wavering financial stability. That is, the most enormous dangerous white elephant ever built, producing electricity (if ever) at some four times the market rate, that nobody can afford without special nuclear levies or subsidies!
Surely any ‘green new deal’ must be global to truly combat Earth’s looming ‘sixth extinction’, and all basic needs be publicly provided as not-for-profit goods, which are shared equally to ensure everyone can live with dignity, heat their homes and feed their families, whilst protecting the planet and future generations.
Alan Debenham
Taunton with a darkie...” I won’t set out the next two or three lines because if I did, I suspect the editor would not print them.
However, those interested can find it set out in full in John Master’s Bhowani Junction. The novel is worth a read for its own sake and is set in India after the Second World War and just before independence. Masters was an Indian Army officer, who had served with the Ghurkhas on the NW Frontier, in Iraq, Syria and Burma, emigrated to the US and became a famous writer and novelist. It’s quite clear from the use of the ‘poem’ and its context that ‘darkie’ had a racist intent (and also clear, incidentally, that Masters deeply disapproved).
So I think the visitors may have had a point on this occasion and Dorset CC could consider changing the lane’s name back to what it was originally.
Peter Wadsley
Bristol by the Bills before Parliament. To skim the surface of these destructive measures: the Policing Bill will permit the authorities to terminate a protest that is found “to be too loud”. How convenient this will be for the Government in power to reduce the activity of groups not to their taste. Wouldn’t it be incredible if, on the other hand, a football match could be cancelled if the racist chanting was found “to be too loud”.
The Judicial and Courts Bill can be used to reduce the legal accountability of the Government: Johnson’s government was prevented by our laws from ruling without parliament when he prorogued it. In future, are we to have no balance of power? Even Trump couldn’t twist the legal system to that extent.
The Elections Bill will be used to reduce the trade union donations to the Labour Party. Meanwhile, donations to the Tory Party, direct or indirect, by Russian or Eastern European billionaires, will continue with the naked conceit that “all is above board”.
The demand for a photographic recognition document to be produced by all voters at future elections means that those without driving licences or passports might be excluded.
The redrawing of constituency boundaries is planned. Will the
Tory Party make sure that the new boundaries help them? And yet some of us still naively believe that the first duty of a democratic government is to protect the rights and freedoms of the citizen.
The crony approach to awarding contracts during the Covid crisis casts a further profound shadow over this Government. Letting “chums” make deals, with no tendering, on the backs of exhausted NHS workers and rapidly rising Covid death rates doesn’t seem very British.
The removal of the £20 benefit uplift will move some 800,000 additional UK citizens into poverty (this figure comes from the Legatum Institute, led by a Conservative
Peer). The Rowntree Trust states that in 2020/21, over one in five British people are already living in poverty, and Shelter tells us that 22% of rented properties are so badly maintained that they are causing ill health. Meanwhile, the pay of the bosses of our top 100 companies is 86 times bigger than average income. Will the Tory policy of “levelling up” really reverse these figures?
Recently Grant Schapps, Minister of Transport, stated that “Brexit shouldn’t be about inconveniencing ourselves”. How much laughter must there be across the EU, the US and other countries that used to respect the UK as a nation of sensible people? Anger as well as laughter, as Lord Frost, Brexit Minister, threatens again to break the Government’s word over aspects of the Northern Ireland protocol, which Mr Johnson said was a “wonderful treaty” when he signed it as recently as December 2020. And now the Tory Government is about to host the Cop26 environment meeting in Glasgow, the most important meeting ever for the “health” of the world and the health of our grandchildren.
Mr Johnson has said that saving the environment will be “easier than Kermit the Frog said it would be” when addressing world leaders at the UN. So to top it all off, our Prime Minister thinks that the climate crisis is a joke.
Jeremy Hall
Exeter