Your letters, including views on Downham councillor resignation and thanks after a Hilgay book sale
Bill sweeps aside nature protection
The Labour Government’s Planning and Infrastructure Bill shifts power from local communities to developers.
It sweeps aside nature protection to allow developers to trample on wild green places. Government ministers seem to have missed the irony that, at the same time as planting more trees to help mitigate climate change, they are planning to effectively destroy our best protection - wild places.
It takes newly planted trees decades before they can become havens for nature and equal the protective function of existing wild places.
Rushed under “urgent measures” procedure, the bill has many flaws. Developers who build on precious wild places will be required to pay into a fund that is supposed to create green spaces somewhere else. But the money is not ring-fenced. It could be used for any form of government spending or used by Natural England to fund its administration and operations. The likely result of this will be that Natural England will come to depend on developers for its survival.
Most developers’ first aim is to make a profit, not to provide affordable homes. Many of the houses built in recent years have been large.
Creating homes for first-time buyers or for people who want to downsize has not been a priority. Building homes that are energy efficient has been the exception, not the rule.
The larger the building, the lower its energy efficiency, the faster we use up the Earth’s finite resources. A more sustainable housing strategy includes repurposing empty buildings and concerted efforts to find and use empty houses.
So opposition to the bill isn’t about “not in my back yard”. It’s about recognizing the importance of nature. It’s about not destroying what we can never get back. It’s about finding sustainable ways to provide homes.
Please search for the Planning and Infrastructure Bill Petition.
The petition urges the Government to withdraw the Bill to protect nature and our communities. It already has over 12,000 signatures but needs to get to 100,000...
Jenny Walker
via email
Emergency responders being failed
I’m writing to you about the amount of times our local emergency services have been called out to suicide and self-harm incidents.
The Government doesn’t ensure our emergency services provide staff with any national standard of suicide prevention training; and yet, Samaritans found that last year, East of England Ambulance Service were called out to 32,014 mental health-related incidents.
These figures show just how often our emergency workers are in contact with those in suicidal crises - and why training emergency response workers is urgent.
Our emergency responders and anyone in crisis from our community are actually being failed.
These workers are often first on the scene when someone is suicidal, so providing them with the skills and confidence they need to identify and support anyone who is suicidal could save lives.
I urge readers to email their local MP and back Samaritans’ call for mandatory suicide prevention training for our emergency responders, to help reduce lives lost to suicide.
Gillian Douglas
Heacham
Openness would be appropriate
What happens after a town councillor resigns having issued a statement declaring that a number of her
colleagues are so untrustworthy she feels compelled to quit?
Here in Downham we have a tricky situation and frankly it occurred to me that these observations need
investigation and hopefully refuting.
Cllr Ali Buxton dished out serious allegations in a resignation letter read out by Downham's mayor Cllr Lane and while it's disappointing to see councillors choosing to 'walk the plank' I feel we need to know if there is any evidence or substance to her very public statement.
Downham Town Council has a bit of a dodgy track record when it comes to running the town's affairs after the unseemly kerfuffle with market traders and I think all of us would like to be totally confident everything is above board and hopefully this supposed culture of untrustworthy attitudes and unethical behaviour is merely a figment of this resigned councillor's imagination. Some openness at this point would be appropriate.
Steve Mackinder
Denver
How safe are 100,000 trees in Norfolk?
The climatologists trundle on relentlessly like a juggernaut, and in a new road called Avenida Liberdade there will be plenty of room for these gas guzzlers. The road is built ostensibly to convey 90,000 delegates in limousines to a COP30 Summit at the Brazilian city of Belem.
As usual it will come at an environmental cost.
Some 100,000 trees have been cut through the dense Amazon rainforest to facilitate this monster with massive disruption to wildlife.
Deforestation has always been an area of contention in the forest, and some of the activists would probably have protested in the past. Not this time, as they are on a vanity project. How safe are 100,000 trees in Norfolk with the builders and Ed Milliband's solar farms?
David Fleming
Downham
They should rebrand as Conformatives
After a dour Conservative Party Conference and running desperately low in opinion polls, even sections of the right wing Tory leaning UK media are predicting the death of the party.
While many on the left of UK politics might well applaud such an outcome, whatever happens electorally to the Parliamentary Conservative Party and as long as there's no revolutionary socialist political threat to the capitalist system, underlying Tory political economic and 'libertarian' ideology and values will remain intact.
In UK politics grass root Conservatives have historically balked and been nervous of the presence of more openly right wing parties like Reform UK. Yet this nervousness ironically stems from actually embracing the same beliefs as Reform UK and other parties on the right.
This has already been practically demonstrated by some leading Conservatives and Tory councillors who've defected.
The defectors obvious thinking is by jumping ship they can wipe their adherence to traditional libertarian failed Adam Smith free market agenda they've always espoused off the record and begin with a clean slate reviving the same provenly defunct ideology in the Reform UK party. This tactic might well induce other Conservative MPs and potential parliamentary candidates to do the same.
The more Tories who defect to Reform UK the more it emphasizes how Reform provides a useful political mechanism for Tory party ideology to entrench itself in a newly rebranded Tory Party when the ridiculously ambiguous Reform UK name can perhaps be dispensed with.
Such a newly branded Conservative Party can also take advantage of numerous disaffected Reform voters who wouldn't normally vote Conservative but are inveigled by a new party name. Moreover, by the time of the next election, Reform UK's anointed leader Nigel Farage could quite possibly have done a runner - just like he did after Brexit- if ever the prospect of him becoming Prime Minister became a reality.
For that reason I don't believe an existential threat to the Tory Party exists.
Similar to the old Whigs changing its name to the Liberals while the Tories then changed their name to the
Conservatives in the late 19th Century, there'll always be some sort of mainstream Conservative Party whatever it calls itself.
Perhaps the 'Conformative' Party would be appropriate.
Nick Vinehill
Snettisham
Book sale raised £2,000+ for hospital
We would like to thanks Lesley, Des, Alec, Michael Dent, George Ashby, Mark Hunniman, Josh Higgins, Ben, Harry and Fiona Tea, Brenda Dent, Justine Roberts, Linda Dent and everyone else who donated and bought books at the Hilgay book sale on Sunday.
Jean Nightingale came all the way from Norwich.
We are still taking donations in but so far we have raised £2,004 for the breast care unit at Lynn’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital.
Ali Dent
Hilgay
Picture of the Week
Cartoon
