Letters - Monday, September 27, 2021

At the behest of the Government, the DVSA stopped all B+E (car and trailer) tests, in order to free up vocational test examiners to carry out more lorry tests.

At some point the law will be changed to allow a newly passed car test driver to tow a trailer up to 3.5 tonnes in weight with no compulsory training and no test of their competence or knowledge.

Given that a car licence (group B) allows a person to drive a car or van up to a maximum weight of 3.5 tonnes, this will enable a basically trained car driver to drive with a combined weight of seven tonnes which is also articulated and therefore more complex than an equivalent weight rigid vehicle.

Considering they would still have to take a test to drive any rigid vehicle over 3.5 tonnes, it is illogical and total madness.

Only carnage on the roads will ensue.

It is a deplorable situation not only for road safety, but in human terms as well.

A not insignificant number of people who have trained hard and worked hard to build businesses have been cruelly treated at the hands of an incompetent Government that panders to social media groups and vested interests rather than doing its best for road safety.

Robert Dent

via email

VIRUS

Familiarity seems to breed indifference

Originating in an Army camp in Eastern USA, not Spain as is so often claimed, the flu pandemic lasted from 1918 to 1921.

Latest research estimates some 65 to 81 million died world wide. By comparison the global deaths from the Covid 19 virus and its mutations is currently 4.7 million.

After a couple of years an odd phenomenon was noticed by researchers into the flu pandemic. Here, in the USA and in many other countries, people were becoming immune to the reported death rates. Several surveys confirmed this.

The daily death tolls were so high at its peak that by early 1920 the Times and Washington Post, for example, published articles that gave hard evidence of the public in both countries ‘becoming immune’ to news of more deaths from flu.

In late 1917 the same reaction had been observed among the British and French general public as death rates soared on the Western Front. Archival evidence gives fascinating details of this phenomenon.

In recent weeks there are signs that the same is becoming increasingly evident here when the latest deaths from the Covid virus are announced in the media.

A few days ago, for example, I heard on the radio an announcer state that ‘only 146 deaths had been recorded in the previous 24 hours’. He added this was 15 less than the previous period. Notice the word ‘only’.

Daily we hear that ‘the end is in sight’ or ‘we are over the worse’. All this despite the fact that hundreds are still dying every day or fighting for their lives in hospital.

Unless someone near and dear to us is among the dead or ill it appears we have become rather blasé and immune to the deaths that the virus is inflicting daily on humankind.

China, for example, has just announced that a new lockdown of two cities each with a population of over 10 million has been imposed.

If there was no pandemic and we heard that 146 people had died in an air disaster somewhere over the UK we would be shocked and very upset but apparently not if that number or more die from a killer virus. The reason being that the latter occurs slowly over weeks and hence gives us time to become accustomed to it. One scholarly piece of research in America argues we ‘become saturated with grief’.

Familiarity, it seems, doesn’t breed contempt it tends to breed indifference.

Dr Barry Clayton

Thornton Cleveleys

POLITICS

Politicians need to take lead on crisis

What is called the care crisis, can only be solved through sensible and rational discussion, but such a discussion cannot take place in the present toxic political climate.

If politicians cannot take the lead on this, then they will no longer be relevant to society.

Politicians who say that it is a matter for the Government are playing political games. It is time to put aside these foolish political games, and for MPs to get on with the serious job they were elected to do. This is something which is so fundamental that it needs the consensus of both Houses of Parliament, and a free vote.

If MPs persist in playing party political games, they will only emphasise how irrelevant they have become.

Jim Buckley

via email

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