Sir Keir is streets ahead of Boris

I HAVE just opened this morning’s

WMN’s and read your question: “What do you think? How do the two main party leaders compare”?

There is no comparison! I don’t belong to any political party. I am a campaigning environmentalist.

I am also the press officer of the ‘Save our Estuary Campaign’, ‘Dog Walkers Alliance’ and more recently ‘Yelland Wildflowering Group’. I am very much aware in these groups there are members of all political persuasions and none.

I have always been fairly robust in discouraging political discourse as we are there to encourage people to our cause regardless of their political leanings. However, this morning

I am about to break my own strict rules! Sir Keir Starmer is miles and streets ahead of Boris. There is no comparison.

However, it is really a coincidence that a few days ago I wrote to Sir Keir at the House of Commons and his constituency address and asked him one question. During the last election, the Labour Party Candidate proclaimed on the front of her leaflet that The Labour Party supported Extinction Rebellion. I consider this would have put many prospective voters off. I therefore wrote to Sir Keir to ask if this has changed in any way under his new leadership?

Extinction Rebellion have made no secret of the fact that they want to infiltrate all sections of society – and it is exactly this far left Marxist group like ‘Rising Up’ and ‘Momentum’ who made The Labour Party totally un-electable at the last election.

I was very pleased to see that Rebecca Long-Bailey was sacked.

I shall endeavour to keep the

WMN fully briefed if and when I receive an answer from Sir Keir!

Joanne Bell West Yelland

Barnstaple

for giving so much space to.

Further, to describe him as a hero is quite ridiculous, the man played football nearly 100 years ago, how does that make him a hero? So he was black, so what?

To make matters worse, some idiots are proposing to raise £100,000 to erect a statue to the man.

I do truly despair. I hope you publish this letter, I doubt if you will. Michael Banks Petrockstowe

Devon

current state with job losses being announced all over the country.

All these people will have to be fed, housed and cared for and until they find jobs, be paid benefits, checked for Covid-19 and vetted to ensure that they are genuine and not in the pay of China.

It is a very difficult situation; do we keep our promise and let these people in and risk a further turndown of our economy, or renege on it and put the welfare of our country first and wait until it has recovered from the current crisis, which may well take several years?

What do other WMN readers think?

Paul Mercer Tavistock

homes for them all.

A dog is for life, not just for lockdown.

The RSPCA found that nearly 20% of people who buy a puppy no longer have the animal two years later. Before you decide to adopt a dog, be certain that you’ll have the time, energy, patience, and money required to provide proper care for life – even when lockdown restrictions have eased and you’re back in your normal routine.

If you can honestly say that you’re prepared to make that lifelong commitment, there’s no need to shop around.

Dogs offered for adoption at shelters and by rescue groups offer all the love and companionship we could ever need.

Sascha Camilli People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, London school teacher had said, “Get to Oxbridge, if you can.” I should have read aquaculture at Liverpool, Stirling or Portsmouth Polytechnic, as it was then.

After scraping a ‘second’ I worked in Cornwall for a year hoping to make marine farming my hobby. But, instead, went to Hong Kong to run a small pearl research station on an island very near the Chinese border, but I found that the smallest adjustment would take years to get approved.

So I returned home via Japan and both coasts of North America, studying oysters and oysterbreeding, all the way. That was where my interest in the sea’s very smallest creatures began.

My father and I established an oyster hatchery beside the Yealm estuary in 1967, for which we had to culture the smallest algae on which to feed our microscopic swimming oyster larvae.

Dr Mary Parke, by that time, had pioneered a bank of living algae because specimens of the different species cannot be preserved, on microscope slides, for example. They have to be kept alive and reproducing under sterile conditions, by taking a few cells from a culture that is nearing its maximum density and starting again.

Dr Parke helped me a lot when my own cultures broke down, when animals about the same size as those swimming plants, between five and ten microns in length, invaded, multiplied and took over the culture, which showed-up with a change in the colour.

Dr Parke had not seen some of my invaders before: flagellates, ciliates and microscopic round-worms, and was very interested and was a very great help to me.

Before the war, Dr Parke had been part of a team, Bruce, Knight and Parke, at Port Erin, Isle of Man, working out which were the best flagellate algae to feed to European Native oyster larvae.

Their paper published in the Journal of the Marine Biological Association in 1940 was a masterpiece and is still very relevant today.

Unfortunately, a comparatively childish paper researched at Conwy, North Wales, was also in the JMBA the same year.

So, when savings had to be made, it was the Port Erin team that was disbanded.

I sincerely hope Dr Mary Parke will be remembered in the creation of the new Centre of Excellence which is where all marine research should have started, especially fisheries research for which some species of swimming algae are the equivalent of grass to cattle farmers and vegetarian mammals from elephants to voles.

Tony Maskell Newton Ferrers, Plymouth