Letters - Thursday, October 15, 2020

As you can imagine, a large number of the calls and letters I receive are about the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.

I have received assurances at the highest level that work is being done urgently to increase testing capacity following a rise in the virus and an increase in the number of people wanting tests.

I am pleased that work continues to expand testing capacity across the UK, to reach a target of 500,000 tests a day by the end of October.

I have spoken to the Leader of the Council and to the NHS and requested that a testing centre be established in Blackpool; to make it easier for local residents to access testing.

In the meantime, people can apply for a Covid-19 test online on the GOV.UK website.

If you have problems using the online service, you can call the NHS Coronavirus testing service on Tel: 119

Scott Benton MP

MP for Blackpool South

Immigration

Callous idea for asylum seekers

One of the primary assumptions of Fascism is the existence of “the other”.

That is an easily identifiable minority who can be blamed for all the problems afflicting society and whose absence or elimination would herald the dawn of a new “golden age”.

Hitler did this with the Jews and other minorities in Germany in the 1930s and now our own Home Secretary, Priti Patel, is playing the same card with regard to asylum seekers, particularly those whose skins are not white.

Her latest wheeze is to transport large numbers of them to barren, inaccessible islands in the South Atlantic or incarcerate them in dilapidated ships or disused oil rigs. Some reports suggest that she has been in talks with the maritime industry about constructing a floating wall in the Channel.

This idea is stupid and callous. The islands, Ascension and St Helena, have sheer cliffs and heavy seas which make landing by boat hazardous.

No aircraft has landed on Ascension since 2017 and the runway on St Helena is completely unusable.

Any form of floating blockage in the Channel, one of the busiest sea lanes in the world, would be an accident waiting to happen.

In any case, the “problem” that Mrs Patel is banging on about is actually diminishing.

Last year, pre-Covid, the number of people seeking asylum in Britain plunged to a 10-year low.

For every 10,000 people living in the UK, there were only about five asylum applications. Measured by asylum claim rates, the UK was 17th in the list of European countries last year. No one would know that if they listened to Mrs Patel. Her willingness to consign to a miserable fate men, women and children, whose lives are already intolerable, is a sign of a person devoid of humanity or compassion. In other words, a typical Tory.

John Prance

address supplied

Education

We need more planning on exams

The announcement of a three-week delay to the timetable for most GCSE and A-Level exams next year will not provide meaningful additional time for students whose preparation for examinations has already been disrupted over a number of months.

Moving the timetable is unlikely to create much additional teaching time per subject, will place significant pressure on the awarding system and the additional time pressures in turning

around exam papers risks a reduction in the number of people willing to work as exam markers.

Reducing content in examinations and enabling greater scope for students to answer optional questions must also be strongly considered in order to reduce the pressures on students and teachers.

We cannot risk a repeat of the chaos which engulfed this year’s exam results and it is imperative that a range of robust and transparent contingency measures are developed, in consultation with the teaching profession, to address the wide range of possible scenarios schoolsand pupils may find themselves in over the coming year.

Patrick Roach

General Secretary

NASUWT

The Teachers’ Union