Letters - Tuesday, October 5, 2021

What happens when the wind doesn’t blow? Well, now we’ve found out. The UK energy sector collapses.

Ever since Labour’s 2008 Climate Change Act, successive governments – Labour, Conservative and Lib Dems – have been obsessed with “net zero”.

The consequence is the UK relies heavily on intermittent electricity generation by solar and wind. If it had not been for the mothballed coal plants (due for demolition) being hastily brought back online, we would have had blackouts. When they’re gone, what is going to be actually available at night when there’s no wind? The answer is nothing.

The Government sets energy policy, not the energy companies. So this Conservative government is directly to blame for our high energy bills; a lack of industrial scale back-up for wind and solar; low storage for natural gas; an effective ban on fracking for gas, resulting in lower UK production; and even greater dependency on wind to come (Boris Johnson’s ‘Saudi Arabia of Wind’).

In addition, Conservative government policy is to deprive our homes of gas heating, making us dependent on electricity – and we’ve just seen how precarious that is. Yet the Government has no plans for extra electricity generation capacity to power that policy. All of this has been made worse by the Government’s untargeted national (Covid) lockdowns which have caused widespread disruption, and shortages of both labour and material.

The Government’s policies are impractical, covered over by political bluster. It is time for Boris Johnson to go.

Nick Martinkek

address supplied

POLITICS

Johnson reaping what he sowed

Re letters in The Gazette about Angela Rayner. Boris Johnson is a man who habitually called black children piccaninnies and has written repeatedly that he thinks black people have watermelon smiles.

Johnson called gay men tank topped bum boys and Muslim women who chose to wear burqas, bank robbers and letter- boxes.

He dismissed working class men as drunk, criminal, aimless, feckless, and hopeless, describing single mothers as uppity and irresponsible.

Johnson argued that people of Liverpool wallow in victim status and those of Portsmouth a city full of drugs and obesity.

So Angela Rayner is right to say that she will only apologise for calling him scum when he retracts and apologise for his long and filthy record of making racist, misogynistic, and homophobic comments.

Johnson is a foul-mouthed bigot who does not deserve civility, respect or sympathy.

It’s high time Johnson learned that you reap what you sow.

Royston Jones

Anchorsholme

POLITICS

Calling for cut in business rates

It is concerning to see the number of shop closures on the rise.

This is true right across the country, but especially in the North and in some of our most deprived communities.

As more people turned to online shopping during the pandemic, the future of our bricks and mortar stores is even more at risk.

Given the social as well as economic importance of physically going to the shops (especially for older people), it is important the Government creates a fairer playing field between online and bricks-and-mortar retail.

That is why I and a number of my colleagues are urging the Chancellor to urgently reduce the level of business rates, or what we should really call it – a shops tax – to give those businesses with a physical presence the chance to compete against the likes of Amazon.

We must find ways to breathe new life back into our high streets.

If we fail to relieve the financial pressure on our hard working shopkeepers then we risk losing thousands of jobs and seeing more boarded up high streets, especially across the North and the Midlands which rely more heavily on retail jobs than other parts of the country.

Scott Benton

Blackpool South MP

FUEL

Selfish idiots at the petrol station

Having just walked past a petrol station with more than 20 cars queuing to no doubt fill their cars to the brim, I have realised that the one thing this country will never be short of is selfish idiots.

I bet that most of the morons you see clogging up petrol stations are the ones who are still using the loo rolls they stockpiled 18 months ago.

Malcolm Nicholson

address supplied