Letters - October 8, 2018

Civil partnerships will strengthen marriage

I welcome Theresa May’s decision to extend civil partnerships to heterosexual couples.

Civil partnership was designed to give legal recognition to a close relationship without conferring the gravitas of traditional marriage. Gay couples understandably resented being offered only this option while some heterosexual couples would have preferred it.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

With civil partnership open to all, it could again serve its unspoken purpose of maintaining the dignity of marriage.

This was previously seen as being threatened by same–sex marriage when the real affront to it comes from serial marriage and divorce.

In the future, we will be able to deny marriage to those whose fickleness brings it into disrepute without the bind that this would also deny them the security and stabilising influence of a legal contract.

John Riseley

via email

Society

These days we need funded police force

I was sad to read of the vicious attack on an older homeless man by three youths (The Gazette, October 3). I hope they are caught.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

In the distant past there was some crime and violence but people lived in communities. People lived closer together and relatives lived nearby. Community disapproval was an important weapon in social control. There was poverty and overcrowding, a view held by Lord Lane Lord Chief Justice ‘it was a time of unprecedented lawfulness in the early 30s’.

So what’s gone wrong? today we live with burglar alarms, CCTV, locks and bolts etc.

Today it is another world, it’s about people on the move, where one hardly knows their neighbours.

Crime cannot solely be blamed on drugs and alcohol. Some parents don’t take enough responsibility for young people’s behaviour. And not all poor young people commit crime. There is a lack of jobs and training and some end up in the prison system. When behaviour gets bad they are turfed out of home to fend for themselves.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

The police lay their lives on the line to protect the public and deserve decent pay and conditions.

Austerity cuts have reduced police and staff. If they do not get more resources then the thin blue line will always be stretched to the point it can hardly cope.

There is an increase in crime and violence. So the police have greater demands on them today.

Crime is an inevitable part of our lives, it can never be eradicated, but if the police are given more funding it can be reduced and kept under control.

P O’Connor

Blackpool

Fracking

How have we reached this stage?

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

As Cuadrilla rushes to frack at Preston New Road, it is perhaps timely to remind ourselves that the Government sanctioned this two years ago after receipt of the Committee on Climate Change Report, ‘The Compatibility of Onshore Petroleum with Meeting the UK’s Carbon Budgets’.

This report indicated that shale gas development would blow a hole in the UK’s emissions targets unless it was tightly controlled, and according to three impossible-to-meet criteria.

This matters little if one denies anthropogenic climate change, of course, but the Government claims not to deny this!

Why have we got to this point? ‘Cognitive dissonance’ cannot still be the answer, so cui bono? Who benefits?

David Cragg-James

via email

Fracking

Let them try and lock us all away!

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Have the Morecambe Bay gas fields helped the West End of Morecambe? Of course not.

The same diversion of profit will happen with fracking and the Fylde coast. Don’t believe the spin.

It is clear the Establishment has set itself on the path of fracking. But we don’t have to put up with it. If you are outraged by the railroading of democracy and the jailing of legitimate protesters, then get out and demonstrate yourself. Can they lock us all away? Let them try!

Nathan Skelly

North Shore