Letters - October 22, 2019

The rising cost of rent in the private housing sector, along with affordable housing, especially for the younger generation, is, along with other issues, being seemingly overshadowed by the long-running saga that is Brexit and the appalling behaviour of some of our politicians that goes with it.

Many people over the years have aspired to owning their own home. This became a reality for some 40 or so years ago when people were given the right to buy their council homes. This arguably kick-started the problems being faced today.

There may therefore be a case for a system with less emphasis on home ownership and more on social housing as in some other countries, with people paying a fair economic rent.

This would presumably mean the problem of how to fund social care would have to be looked at from a different angle.

Although such changes are unlikely to happen here, it is certainly a problem that needs to be addressed if the Government is to realise one of its pledges of making work pay for everyone.

H Genders

via email

SOCIETY

Shame people to stop drug demand

Re: Drugs. The authorities have been trying to tackle the problem by focusing on the supply of drugs.

Yet the problem gets worse.

Surely it will only be solved when there is less demand?

The supply problems will always be there if there is a ready lucrative market.

It is at last becoming clear that the market is fuelled by people with money, not by the poor down-and-outs.

The message that taking drugs is risky does not seem to work.

I would suggest that it should be tackled in the same way as drink driving, such as a national campaign aimed at showing users the effect that their purchases have on others, similar to the drink driving adverts showing the effect of car crashes on crash victims.

The campaign used to shame drink drivers was highly successful.

If people are shamed into stopping buying drugs, the whole chain of problems will go away and all our lives and communities will be safer.

Robert

Mansfield

Address supplied

NOSTALGIA

Life is far

better now

As people get older, there is a tendency to see the past as better than now.

I don’t believe the streets were safer in the past and a brief look at records shows this.

As I remember in the 1960s, there were always men fighting on a Saturday night, there were areas where “decent” folk wouldn’t venture. Some of the respect for policemen, I believe, was more fear than respect.

The fair justice system was no fairer than today, when there is still the same gap between justice for the rich and justice for the poor.

I am much happier today than when I was poor, lived in a house which was damp and cold.

It was a time when women were regarded as having smaller brains than men. Women were not given the same opportunities in education that they are today.

There was appalling racism and dreadful attitudes to homosexuals. Today many things are so much better than in the past, thanks to the actions of those who have demonstrated and petitioned against such ills.

How do you know how happy people were then?

It seem to me that the greatest divide in the country is between rich and poor and it is getting worse because of the actions of this Conservative Government.

Janet Portman

via email

BREXIT

EU exit should have happened after poll

Brexit should have happened there and then, directly after the result of the referendum, which was to Leave.

A group of Remain politicians, headed by Theresa May, were not prepared to get behind that democratic decision, and to work to make the decision to leave work. None of the division of the people of this country would ever have happened.

We still live in a democratic country and democratic decisions must be adhered to, or we might as well capitulate.

Phyllis Capstick

via email