What do you think?
Has the immigration issue turned toxic in this country? Join the debate by emailing letters@westerndailypress.co.uk and including your name and address
not use our taxes to oppress us.
The people of this country are no longer represented by those we pay to govern. Perhaps the suffragist movement was right – ‘no taxation without representation’.
Karen Jacob Devon in Australia, another right-wing country. It was a total failure and has been condemned by the United Nations as a cruel, costly and ultimately futile system.
I hold no truck with the criminals charging absurd amounts to bring refugees to this shore but this is most definitely not the answer. It is cruel and inhumane. Why does the government refuse to accept the French offer of running reception centres on French soil?
Please do not say that these refugees are entering the country illegally unless you can show me what the legal ways are to reach Britain? The plans for Afghans and Ukrainians certainly aren’t working.
I speak as the daughter of a refugee who came to this country in 1940 with her Belgian mother, her sister and best friend who happened to be Bulgarian and Jewish. I dread to think what would have happened had they not been allowed to land from their boat but sent to Rwanda instead. As my MP, I trust you will be doing everything in your power to ensure that this inhuman plan never comes to fruition.
Emma Grainger Devon present. I’m helped by my regular showing at full council meetings asking ‘public questions’, especially the annual budget meeting of last February 23rd. I put questions about the council’s debt situation and non-delivery of services in terms of deliberate and severe year-on-year cuts from 2010’s Tory government’s national election, preceded by a Tory takeover of county council in 2009.
This period was of Tory austerity against our public services in general, but especially our treasured NHS and local councils, the latter by systematic withdrawal of the Westminster Revenue Support
Grant, which used to make up some two-thirds of annual council spending, now reduced to near zero and partly replaced by scurrilous use of grants from Westminster via Tory ‘bidding procedures’, allowing for the corrupt steering of public funds into local Tory councillors’ and MPs’ pet projects.
Tory Party national and local propaganda is second to none in repetition of its arrogant brainwashing themes of being the only party of ‘business efficiency’ able to ‘deliver vital services’, giving ‘more for less’. All this, despite annual hikes in unfair council tax (unrelated to incomes) and the Tory-created financial and staffing disaster of the recent Taunton Deane-West Somerset merger proving that
‘bigger is not better – neither economically nor democratically – plus the fact that 65% of us, in an official ballot, voted for ‘two unitaries’, not One Somerset.
Abolition of our popular district councils, trying to replace them with nebulous LCNs and one overall council, covering a vast area with only half as many councillors, looks like yet another Tory imposed catastrophe. When Lib Dems last ruled the county, there was debt totalling £324m financed by interest payments of £42,000 per day, but nothing for Tories to crow about when, under their present rule, debt is the same £324m with interest at £41,460 a day.
Another question of mine not answered was: when are our arrogant Tory ‘fantastic deliverers of public services at turbo-charged, levelling-up efficiency’ going to restore all the plethora of services and staff they cut in their austerity hey-days? If not, could they please go and ‘die in the same ditch’ that buffoon Boris did in October 2019: now May 2022 ?
Alan Debenham Taunton, Somerset