MPs are right to back our local airline
HOW nice to see the MP for Thirsk and Malton, Kevin Hollinrake, together with his Harrogate colleague Andrew Jones, successfully petition the Treasury for additional financial help for Jet2 should it be needed (The Yorkshire Post, March 16).
Compared to many airlines Jet2 has been a shining example of fairness to its customers over the last 12 months, as I know personally with speedily returned booking monies.
Little or no whining from our local airline about the scale of its losses, unlike some.
I know Jet2 has a number of bases, indeed quite a few of its fleet are in Murcia currently, parked up for better times, but LBA will always be home in the eyes of many of us.
How sad, therefore, that it takes non Leeds or Bradford MPs to fight their corner, more so as I would suggest, without them LBA would simply become a trivial airstrip and loose other operators. For me, it would serve the owners and the two councils right if they moved out to Dishforth or Doncaster.
From: Ian French, Huddersfield.
IT was interesting to read that the UK’s economy has apparently shrunk by 2.9 per cent GDP since the pandemic began. Economists and media were quibbling over their own predictions for many months, and looked likely that the percentages were going to be much worse.
There are some people out there that will scoff at those predictions just as much as they may scoff at the released statistics.
However, even if some businesses have adapted to such changes, I really do not see how having a country which has such lowly amounts of tax receipts coming into the Treasury due to a year-long lockdown, combined with massive Government spending and borrowing on historic levels not seen since the Second World War, could result in a 2.9 per cent GDP loss.
Most of the country’s businesses are still shut down with zero taxable income, and are reliant on Government handouts just to survive. This is not what I would call ‘‘adapting their business model’’, but instead resembles a ghost town that generates no money.
Something just doesn’t add up here. I suspect there has been a little bit of massaging of the figures. I also suspect that once an inquiry is undertaken into the Government’s handling of the pandemic, we will then see the full picture and I, for one, will welcome that inquiry.
From: Gareth Robson, Kent House Road, Beckenham.
I WRITE in praise of the article by Andrew Vine (The Yorkshire Post, March 16, criticising the plan to spend real money on assessing the feasibility of the plainly unfeasible and largely pointless crossing between Galloway and Northern Ireland via the world’s largest munitions dump.
The discussion seems to have been: “Prime Minister! The UK is drifting apart.”
“Well let’s bind it together with bridges.”
His bizarre mind has not grasped the nature of the centrifugal forces acting on the UK and therefore cannot understand that physical infrastructure is not the answer.
This affair shows the dangerous lack in our constitutional laws of any means of controlling a wayward prime minister. Something must be done – but by whom? The Privy Council, perhaps?