Your letters on having a King's Lynn town council, the Queen Elizabeth Hospital rebuild, Hardwick Roundabout traffic and politics
Here are the letters from the Lynn News edition of Friday, October 13, 2023...
Town council would give residents a greater say
I’m grateful to the former Lynn News editor Malcolm Powell for his letter to the Lynn News on Tuesday in relation to the possibility of a future Kings Lynn Town Council.
Anyone who I’ve had the opportunity of talking to about this subject, or who follows me on social media, will know I am very keen on this proposal and been pushing for some time.
Since elected to represent the residents of Gaywood, I have realised that the lack of parish or town council is preventing excellent ideas and schemes getting the funding they deserve.
We should be having this conversation now, as consultation and any implementation would take time.
I appreciate why the Conservatives might not be keen on the idea, because they know they would have little, if any, representation.
I think a town council would give residents a greater say on what should happen in their area, enhance democracy locally and reassure residents that they aren’t missing out on funding of projects.
Cllr Rob Colwell
Gaywood South, Norfolk County Council, Gaywood North Bank, West Norfolk Council
New car park will cost £42M
Like all in West Norfolk I was delighted with the announcement of funding for the rebuild of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital.
Unlike many I am not convinced of the wisdom of the decision to rebuild on the existing site as I do not believe that this is value for money as other sites are available.
QEH management asserts that only by building onsite can the deadline of a new hospital in 2030 be achieved and that the earliest a green field site could be available is by 2033.
This, however, is an assertion by management, but their decision has momentum with each day that passes.
It is the case that locally, neither Borough nor County Council has any scrutiny of this decision and neither seems interested in satisfying themselves that this is the best decision for West Norfolk.
The line is that awkward b******s such as me put the whole project at risk and act from some sort of self-interest.
But as a councillor I do believe in scrutiny of decisions made by public bodies and I remain unconvinced by the presentations made by the QEH and disappointed in the lack of political oversight.
I was in fact the only councillor to not vote for the first part of the QEH masterplan when it came to planning.
And today I learned that the cost of the proposed multi-storey car park on the QEH site is a cool £42,000,000.
Again I would like to see the evidence that a new site would necessarily delay the project to 2033 completion. This is not the view of many I know in the civil engineering sector.
Tom Ryves
Methwold
Exit barriers for Lynn would really help
Another summer of near misses, and some not so, has once again come to a close. The Lynn Southern bypass entry to the Hardwick Roundabout appears to have slipped under National Highways’ radar again, either accidentally, or purposefully, only they will know.
Every Saturday and Sunday during the season, a mixture of road rage and a giant game of chicken ensues, with myopic grockles in the left-hand lane, clearly marked on the road as Lynn, pushing into the lane for the coast. This dangerous state of affairs unsurprisingly leads to road rage, as those in the correct lane then become marooned in the yellow box.
It is also not helped by the lack of signage at eye height approaching the roundabout... there used to be signage there, but this mysteriously disappeared a few years ago, never to return.
However, all the signage in the world will not help to stop the selfish behaviour of those who feel it beneath them to queue in the correct lane with us oiks.
Is it beyond the realms of possibility to erect some barriers that only allow exit into Lynn from this lane?
If placed with some thought, they would not interfere with the traffic already on the roundabout... in fact, this would help the flow of traffic into Lynn, and cut out the carnage at a stroke. Yours in hope.
Marcus Liddington
via email
Don’t take ill under a Labour Government
It's 2 30pm on October 10 as I watch Sir Keir Starmer's speech at his Party Conference in Liverpool and already he is tripping himself up.
Predictably he masqueraded the NHS as Labour's sacred cow.
He has promised to transform it, but he cannot use the Party-run Welsh National Health Service as an example on how he can, in the light of its failings there.
His aim of cutting NHS waiting lists nationally rings hollow when Welsh patients regionally go over the border to England for treatment where they are not kept waiting as long.
What will be a big barrier to Sir Keir Starmer expediting NHS appointments and operations are his plans to have a policy of allowing illegal migrants en masse into the country to swell waiting lists. The arithmetic simply doesn't add up and neither will his utopian vision to the politically informed.
The speech has just ended at 3.02pm and so this letter is concluding! My parting sentence is don't take ill under a future Labour Government.
David Fleming
Downham
Not tricky when you think about it
I was completely captivated by David Fleming's letter discussing Switzerland's political system of regular national referenda which direct and inform their Government of the nation's wishes regarding all aspects of their lives.
Imagine a world where we felt like we had a direct say in our social and political direction and the extraordinary amounts of money we pay our politicians benefited us. Frankly, it looks like we could save a fortune and totally eliminate that squabbling disingenuous bunch of selfish party-politically obsessed lickspittles called Parliament and feed the decisions made by the regular referenda into our Civil Service without having to involve this hopeless and ludicrous tier of bureaucracy at all.
We should also be able to disengage with our borough and county councillors and their pitiful 'bickering clubs' as well.
We could sack them all and be masters of our own destiny and the likes of MPs like Liz Truss and James Wild could all just be given some tranquillisers and put out to grass.
All we'd have to do then would be to keep the 'lefty' and 'righty' crazies from having any real influence and all would be hunky dory.
This politics malarkey isn't that tricky when you think about it... is it?
Steve Mackinder
Denver
