Letters - Wednesday, April 28, 2021

It’s this time of year again! Humans are busy deciding how to vote, and the migratory birds are winging their way hopefully back to our northern shores all the way from Africa!

I saw my first swallow – bird on a wire – on Sunday.

It’s all about hope: elections and those birds flying back thousands of miles to nest here.

Will their nest sites, to which they are loyal all their lives, be safe, or will they have been inadvertently damaged by human activity?

Swifts nest in nooks and crannies.

They can’t build nests as swallows and martins do.

Sadly, many of their nest sites will have been made useless due to reroofing, scaffolding and so on, and it’s very hard for them to find a new site.

So, as well as possible starvation due to humans poisoning the insect world, they face homelessness too.

No wonder they are now endangered.

So what can we do?

We can learn about swifts and where they nest.

We can protect nest sites and put up nest boxes.

We can also inform Swift Conservation or the RSPB or the National Biodiversity Network.

Regarding the upcoming elections: just make sure you vote for someone who really means it when they say they care about nature.

Shan Oakes

via email

Picture: Steven Sutcliffe

FOOTBALL

PM’s welcome change on football

It is amazing how politicians can jump on bandwagons so fast.

Boris Johnson is not noted for his interest in football but when popular opposition surfaced he quickly denounced Super League plans.

There was a different story back in 2005. Then Boris Johnson wrote approvingly of Manchester United’s sale to the American Glazer brothers as “basic Conservative philosophy” even though it led to treating clubs as global commodities of interest only for their TV rights.

Just as well that politicians, like the rest of us, can change their minds.

Roger Backhouse

address supplied

SOCIETY

Ethics now are ‘do as you please’

The awful cases being revealed recently, of various sexual crimes make for very distressing hearing and reading.

Being 84, I was brought up in the 1940s and 1950s and do not recall sexual cases taking up so much news space.

Remembering those distant days, so many families were the traditional “mum and dad and children”, and huge numbers of children attended church and Sunday school.

A link between “then” and “now” seems to me to be a lack of following Christian rules and ethics these days. Too often nowadays ethics seem to be based on a “do as you please” basis.

Canon Michael Storey

address supplied

SOCIETY

False prophet of capitalism

I have always thought that capitalism is a self-destructive form of government.

It always requires growth in profits to continue its existence.

The human fascination with greed and selfishness feeds this situation.

We produce countless products that no one really needs or wants but the mass media’s constant advertising methods make us believe we cannot do without them.

We are consuming our planet’s natural resources at an alarming speed, things that can never be replaced. There must be an answer before total destruction.

JC Penn

via email

BREXIT

More red tape than before

Before Brexit we enjoyed friction-free trade and open borders within the EU.

Having closed our borders in a vain pursuit of sovereignty, we now have to complete all the red tape at the borders as a ‘third country’ and need to employ some 50,000 customs inspectors and agents to enforce it.

Just to remind ourselves, these are 50,000 jobs which do not produce anything.

They exist solely to process Brexit red tape.

We were much better off in the EU.

Ken Cooke

via email

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