Letters - February 12, 2016

Some you win, but some can be a nightmare for them. But we must not tar them all with the same brush! My partner is now resident at the Layton Lodge, Layton. The manager, Hilda, and her assistant manager, Paula, and the wonderful team of carers have made the residents smile a lot.

The facilities, bedrooms, toilets are as good as any B&B, if not better than some. If the Layton Lodge had a sign above the door it would not read, “Abandon all hope, you who enter here.” It would read instead: “You have done your bit in life, now it’s your turn to do our bit for you, welcome.”

To quote Shelagh Parkinson, recently in the Gazette: “Care is not just about money it is about the quality of service, the continuity and confidence of the provider.”

John Munro

Boundary Court

Blackpool

PLANNING

Homes at cost of 
the countryside

Every time I read the headline ‘homes plan’, I think of an alternative one – ‘Lancashire’s countryside continues to be destroyed’.

Jane

Lancashire

TRANSPORT

Government cuts to blame for tram row

The Conservative Wyre Councillor Andrea Kay, in the Politically Correct column (Gazette, February 3) reveals she is a person who fails to see the wood for the trees.

The councillor wrongly blames Lancashire County Council for the fact retired residents of Wyre cannot use Blackpool trams free. As a councillor, Andrea should know the county council offered to share the cost of tram travel for Wyre retired residents with Wyre Council, but the local council refused, preferring to blame firstly Blackpool then the county council.

She ignores the fact that Lancashire County Council has suffered massive cuts to their funding from central government. That is an indisputable fact, for anyone to see.

I have read in The Gazette that the Conservative MP for the constituency has raised this very matter with the government. This indicates that he knows where the problem started, and how it could be stopped.

Surely Ms Kay is aware of the cuts in local government funding? For Lancashire County Council they have already amounted to several hundred million pounds, an enormous amount. However, the very latest prediction is that, by 2020, the cuts will amount to a staggering £685million.

In the article she stated: “The County has the funding and the resources to fund the Now card.” Really Ms Kay!

I suggest the Tory councillor begins to think clearly, stops playing politics, be honest and puts the blame where it rightly belongs – on this Conservative government.

Jack Croysdill

Chairman Blackpool North/Cleveleys Labour Party

POLITICS

Cameron won’t get what the UK needs

Surely no one in the country is even slightly fooled by David Cameron’s EU “renegotiations”.

His pathetic failure has served only to help convince voters, of all political persuasion, that leaving the European Union is the only way forward to secure the future of our country.

And if they need further evidence of this we now learn that after the referendum the EU Parliament’s committees could just rip up the legislation deals.

The planned emergency brake on migrants’ benefits – which would not be under our control – could be vetoed and the EU has no intention, nor ever will, of revising their principal tenets.

The crumbling edifice of the European Union – doomed to failure from the outset – is constructed around ever closer union, the single currency and freedom of movement.

Cameron can huff and puff all he wants, he won’t get what this country needs. He may be fooled by watered-down agreements, which would never be watertight anyway, but the public is not as gullible as he thinks.

Paul Nuttall

UKIP North West MEP and deputy party leader

CAMPAIGN

Sign up to stop EU interference in food

Readers, sign a petition to the Government to stop the European Commission from interfering in decisions about ingredients in British foods such as cereals, cakes, frozen foods, and so on.

Go to www.petition.co.uk, enter the section called Community, and sign the petition Hands off British Food.

FE Sharpe

address supplied