Letters

Housebuilders ‘greedy and uncaring’

DO you print letters from smug, self-opinionated prigs? Here is one.

Energy crisis – not for us. Our solar thermal installation heats all the hot water we need for at least four months of the year – free of charge.

Our PV panels provide 1,100 units of electricity – now worth £374 in savings.

If Mr Putin now invaded Poland and world gas prices quadrupled we would still have our water heated and 1,100 units of electricity free of charge. Yes, we did have to pay for this green renewable technology – as we all have to pay for things – like heating oil, clothes, electricity bills, holidays, furniture etc.

Do you remember ‘Vote Blue, Go Green’ and after 12 years to find alternative sources of energy we mostly have not, or this government has not.

British Gas is running a massive advertising campaign to persuade as many people as possible to commit to expensive and polluting gas and the vast majority of housebuilders will not put renewable technology into new homes.

Above all else you must maximise profits and once your snout is jammed into the trough you can’t see over the brim or see anything coming.

Mostly due to the energy crisis we now have a recession, increased taxation, a fall in living standards, more cuts to public services and rising mortgage rates.

The greedy and uncaring housebuilders face the prospect of rapidly falling sales and losses.

In the meantime, the taxpayer is footing the bill for government failures – Vote Blue, Go Green – and the greed of the energy companies and the housebuilders.

Nuclear power? Built by the Chinese, six to ten years to do and after 40 years no-one knows what to do with them. You are having a laugh.

Tory government – this is how to be popular and reelectable.

Richard Foley Tarrant Hinton

I HAVE read with interest your letters and articles about Robert Baden-Powell, who died in 1941.

In my eyes, he was a great man. I remember, as a child, visiting his grave at Nyeri, Kenya. The grave then was very well kept. Not far from his grave were the graves of British soldiers who had been killed by the Mau Mau.

I imagine they will still be well tended by the War Graves Commission but I wonder if it’s the same for B-P’s grave? I certainly hope so.

Jill Trueman Cucklington

I READ the very sad letter from someone who felt they are no longer a person – just a number (New Blackmore Vale, November 11).

I find it difficult to hear that an individual with several medical problems, who feels the need to try to make an appointment with a doctor, thinks their only option is to sit at home and possibly end up at Accident & Emergency, maybe not to recover – and feel they are now only a number that will barely be missed.

Why do they feel this way?

Because, along with so many others, they are not IT-savvy and choose not to have a mobile phone.

What an awful way for them to feel! It’s time we made our poorly and elderly feel needed and respected.

We should all be trying to make their lives easier – technology is all very well for those able to absorb but to some people it is just yet another hurdle. Your needs do matter. Wishing you good health and happiness.

Cartoon by Lyndon Wall – justsocaricatures.co.uk

AFTER reading Jeremy Bloomfield’s letter (NBVM, 25 November) I had to re-read my earlier letter to work out why he felt I had given him a lecture – I failed: I thought I was simply stating the obvious.

And without wishing to engage in ‘a race to the bottom’, I can assure him that having been born in a farm cottage in 1943, my early childhood experience, including rationing and the scarcity of bananas, was similar to his.

Of course, those years didn’t feel like hardship as we knew nothing else.

However, this is irrelevant to the issue of poverty in today’s world as we did not suffer from drought, flood or other effects of climate change.

In regard to my comment about countries barely able to feed themselves, Mr Bloomfield’s reply is that ‘many of these countries do not support their own populations and yet finance space research and nuclear weapons’.

In fact, only ten countries have nuclear weapons – although no one is quite sure about North Korea – and most of these are ‘developed’ countries.

So that still leaves dozens if not hundreds of others such as Yemen and drought-stricken regions of Africa that are genuinely in need.

I referred to competition for resources and didn’t actually

mention overseas aid, which Mr Bloomfield says ‘is often totally misdirected’.

But if that is the case does that mean we should stop giving aid altogether? Or perhaps we should be more discerning and ‘savvy’ about how it is channelled and administered.

Turning to this country and Mike Keatinge’s comment in the same NBVM issue, I wondered if he was serious in saying ‘wealth does indeed trickle down...we have people sufficiently well-off to give to food banks’.

Does he really think people are happy to rely on food banks as did Lazarus ‘on the crumbs off the rich man’s table’ (Bible, Luke 16:21).

Yes, some of us are living comfortable lives – I have no complaints in that regard – but what is the evidence that all the wealthy are philanthropists?

Mr Keatinge says that ‘an organism which ceases to grow will generally decline and die’ – but is that a justification for continuing the present trend indefinitely? Are there no limits?

Sometimes it’s necessary to prune a plant to keep it healthy – and to leave room for others.

Revd Colin Marsh Gillingham

I WOULD like to apologise to Jeremy Bloomfield if I wrongly accused him of being a Conservative Party member.

However, it did seem that his comments about Simon Hoare indicated that a party Mr Bloomfield supported had been betrayed.

Further, he suggested that Lord Frost, ennobled by Boris Johnson and carrying the Conservative whip in the House of Lords, should be North Dorset’s MP.

Curious for someone who is not, at least, a Conservative Party supporter but then that is par for the course in the surrealist politics and economics of the Brexit brigade.

I am also old enough to remember the privations of the 1950s, the bomb sites, the ration cards, the general drabness of post-war Britain, a reaction to which prompted our attempts to join the Common Market.

It was a Conservative Prime Minister, Edward Heath, who finally secured our entry. Another Conservative Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, even managed to improve our deal so that we had better membership terms than other countries.

Unfortunately, the dire predictions before Brexit of ‘Project Doom’ appear to be coming true. No ‘oven-ready deal’, a rotten deal for our farmers with Australia for the prospect of 5p off Nottage Hill, a trade agreement with Japan which has actually seen our trade decrease, an almost total loss of control over our borders, no trade deal even in prospect with the United States, a massive increase in red tape for exporters to our nearest large market, historically high inflation about a quarter of which is directly attributable to the consequences of Brexit, chaos over trade with Northern Ireland, Scotland wishing to withdraw from the Union, and not even our fishermen are better off.

Worse still, at a time when Europe needs more than ever to stand united against a general threat to all our freedoms, we are not at the top table.

Deals risk being done into which we will have had no input. Thank you to the clear eyed, level-headed, perpetrators of Brexit.

Back in the halcyon days of the last century, as a commercial bee-keeper, I was able to cross the Channel with a car full of jars of honey and sell them in France.

Later, I took a van load of cheese, yes British cheese, to France and flogged that. I couldn’t do it now. It is almost impossible for a small trader to surmount the hurdles that have been resurrected by Brexit.

As for ‘woke’, I notice Mr Bloomfield has avoided a definition – perhaps ‘wokeness’ amounts to no more than trying to live by, and expect, standards of common decency?

Jit Davies Twyford

I MUST take issue with several assertions made by the MP for South West Wiltshire, Andrew Murrison (New Blackmore Vale, November 25). It is instructive to recall that China produces 28 per cent, and rising, of world carbon compared to the UK’s 1 per cent.

Secondly, we should take note of China’s latest 30-year contract with Qatar for 4 million tonnes a year of liquefied natural gas.

Electricity comprises 35 per cent of our energy consumption. Over the last 12 months average production by source was: gas 38 per cent, renewables – wind and solar – 31 per cent, nuclear 16 per cent.

The percentage for renewables varies widely depending on the absence or strength of wind and sun. The contribution of gas to the balance of energy production is even higher, whereas the contribution of renewables is negligible.

The UK will continue to depend to a large extent on gas, both for electricity, including standby capacity for renewables, and for energy.

I cannot agree with Mr Murrison that Jeremy Hunt’s Budget was encouraging. Firstly, the North Sea is a mature province, where the risks for future exploration and development are higher and the returns are likely to be lower.

What possible justification can there be to impose a windfall tax retrospectively, which is likely to destroy confidence and drive away investment.

Secondly, what possible justification is there for closing our fracking industry, which has the potential to create a major new source of domestic gas?

Thirdly, what justification is there for proceeding with Sizewell C, when EDF continues to struggle with its three nuclear power stations using this obsolescent technology, when all three are substantially over budget and years behind scheduled completion dates.

Why was there no mention in the Budget of Rolls Royce modular nuclear power stations, which should be a priority.

Britain has the expertise and resources to achieve selfsufficiency in electricity and its wider energy requirements, if only the politicians would face up to reality and put aside their unrealistic target of achieving ‘net zero’.

Patrick de Pelet Via email

SIMON Hoare MP believes Rishi Sunak to be ‘sincere and honest’ and Mr Sunak himself promised us ‘honest and transparent’ government.

Yet, speaking to political journalists, Sunak says we now have 50,000 new nurses, omitting the fact that that number does not cover those who have left the NHS just in this last year, nor does he mention the 130,000 – and growing – NHS vacancies as dispirited and overwhelmed doctors and nurses leave.

Sunak stated that there are now 15,000 extra – inexperienced and poorly vetted – police officers, omitting the fact that George Osborne’s austerity ensured the loss of 21,000 experienced officers under the Cameron government with the resulting surge in reported crime rates.

Sunak and Hunt blame the Ukraine war and world prices for the UK financial black hole yet independent financial research stated that Truss and Kwarteng’s mini-budget was responsible for £30bn of this sum.

Honesty within a Conservative government went out of the window with the advent of Johnson and still shows no sign of making a return.