What a joke

What a joke the Crime Commissioner’s Office (CCO) is becoming.

On one hand the CCO is wanting more money to put bobbies on the beat; on the other it is wasting £51,000 on ‘Trinkets’ (The News, December 10).

The Crime Commissioner’s Office is a total waste of taxpayers’ money. All the CCOs in the UK should be shut down.

Could The News doa feature on how much money is being wasted on the CCOs in the UK?

We had Chief Constables doing this job before, so what are they doing now?

We need a vote on whether we want or need CCOs.

Frobisher Grove, Portchester that is all too common. It wasn’t the Conservative party that ‘ripped this country apart’ as she put it, it was the failure of democracy. The question of EU membership was never a Conservative problem, it was a national problem and exacerbated by a cynical Labour party which eventually made the referendum inevitable. As to austerity it’s very easy to join the call for an end to it if all you care about is glib headlines but in the last 10 years NHS spending has risen from £108 billion to £160 billion and welfare spending from £55 billion to an astonishing £126 billion. Of course inflation accounts for some of that but the inescapable hard truth is that rocketing demand from population growth, longer life and advances in medicine to name but a few means the money is spread too thinly. To accuse the Conservative party of ‘bringing austerity’ given what went before under a Labour government is not just untrue but wilfully partisan. If you believe in a socialist Marxist government say so but don’t dress it up or you may be the one called a ‘buffoon’.

Barn Fold, Waterlooville