Letters - July 29, 2016

It seems to be just another of their bright ideas, such as the seating in the middle of the road at Layton shops – I have never, ever seen anyone actually sitting there. Well, who would want to with all the traffic fumes, quite apart from the buses holding up traffic every seven minutes.

If I travel from London to stay with relatives in Marton, I would not get on the tram to take me down to the front, where I would need to search for a bus – nightmare!

What would be useful, and makes much more sense, is to go through a tunnel to what is now Wilkos to find a proper, well-run bus station.

Blackpool relies so much on visitors – they get to Blackpool North and find so much difficulty in finding the right bus to continue their journey. Most of them give up and use the admirable taxi service, which is expensive if one is going quite a distance, like the holiday parks at Thornton or Marton.

And what about the hard-working shop-keepers losing footfall? I would not be happy about the council borrowing money that must be paid back out of my council tax.

Annie de Vree

Bright Street

Blackpool

TRANSPORT

Council should listen to those who vote

I think the people of this town have made it perfectly clear that they do not want this tram spur up the Talbot Road.

I think the council should take notice and at least put this project on hold until the people of the town make their feelings known, after all they are the people who put you in the position you now hold, take notice it could well be the death of your jobs and rightly so.

My feelings are that you are throwing open the door to UKIP, and neither Labour nor Conservative will welcome the extreme government UKIP proposes.

On a personal note, I feel I must say goodbye to Eddie Collett, a dear friend, we always seem to lose the best of us first

Bruce Allen

via email

TRANSPORT

Vote out those who went for tramway

Let’s have The Gazette print the names of all the councillors who voted to waste all this money on the tramway extension, something we just don’t need... then we can vote them all out at the next council election.

Mr Howard Gorton

Canterbury Avenue

Blackpool

transport

Money should have gone to the airport

If Blackpool Council can find £4.7million for the tramway extension, why could they not find the money for Blackpool Airport?

Jay

St Annes

ENVIRONMENT

We need you to clean up the town

I am writing in response to the letter from Brian Goodwin, re the long grass (Your Say, Gazette, July 23).

Does he not realise that dog mess and children do not mix? We know things are tough at the moment, and in the British style we should be getting together and helping to make our areas nice places to live in.

I run a group called CLUB (CLeanUpBlackpool), and we clean alleyways, we do litter picks and generally help to get Blackpool a place to be great again.

There are lots of groups working tirelessly in the town and would always welcome new members.

Vince McNulty

Chair ( CLUB)

POLITICS

Beware ‘wrecking crew’ Tories

Instead of judging Prime Minister Theresa May as a woman, we should be looking at her policies.

In her first week in charge, her Government has brought in policies to force struggling families needing welfare to call a premium rate number. It is difficult enough to live on disability benefits without being charged 45p a minute to call the Department of Work and Pensions.

Theresa May has also abolished the Department for Energy and Climate Change, which is a signal the post-Brexit UK will be a disaster for the environment. May has ignored a Government report that urgent action is needed to protect Britain from flooding, deadly heatwaves, and water shortages caused by global warming. Theresa May and her cabinet are shaping up to be an environment wrecking crew.

John Appleyard

via email

FOOD

Get informed, and make right choices

The government has this week released details of on-farm inspections from 2015, and they make depressing reading. Of the hundreds of thousands of animal farms across Great Britain, just 1,681 were inspected throughout the whole year.

Pigs and ‘broiler’ chickens appear to be among the least inspected species, despite being the most intensively farmed.

Animal Aid has conducted dozens of on-farm inspections over the past decade and found appalling suffering in every pig and chicken farm we have visited. Sows are still confined inside farrowing crates, suffer greatly from untreated injuries, and live all too often in filth and without any meaningful enrichment. Chickens are still packed into sheds without daylight or fresh air.

For a nation of animal lovers, their treatment is a scandal. But so, too, is the paucity of official inspections.

Please ensure your food choices are not supporting this suffering. Order a free Go Vegan pack by visiting www.animalaid.org.uk/go/veganpack or phoning 01732 364 546.

Isobel Hutchinson

Head of Campaigns

Animal Aid