YP Letters: Business rate burden on our hospitals

THE comments on the PFI burden for NHS hospitals were very good, but this is not the only financial millstone they have to bear, as the dreaded business rates is another.

It seems incredible to most people that any vital public service funded entirely by the taxpayer should have to pay anything like that out of its budget, which only takes more money away from front line medical care.

The supreme irony is that many private hospitals are allowed to claim charitable status, which entitles them 
to an 80 per cent discount on rates!

The same crackpot rule is used by expensive and exclusive public schools like Eton.

It would seem yet another case of the lunatics allowed to take over the asylum, the insane in this case being thepoliticians who authorise such anomalies.

Maybe some of them have shares in private medical care provision?

Duty to back Repeal Bill

From: Neil Liversidge, Great Preston, near Leeds.

THE EU Repeal Bill is due to be debated in Parliament this month. The bill is central to the government’s plan to exit the EU in 2019, because it releases Britain from more than 40 years of the supremacy of EU laws and it repeals the 1972 treaty that made Britain a member of the EU.

It is important that people realise that if the bill doesn’t pass then Britain will remain under the remit of EU law.

It is, therefore, very disappointing that there are reports emerging of MPs planning to oppose the bill.

Any effort to oppose the bill – or to dilute it via a succession of wrecking amendments – would effectively prevent Britain leaving the EU and would fly in the face of the decision Britain’s electors made last year in the referendum to leave the EU.

As chair of Change Britain and former Labour MP Gisela Stuart says: “The Repeal Bill is the first essential step in leaving the EU and will enable us to take back control of our laws in an orderly way. MPs must now do their democratic duty and vote for it.”

MPs should work to make a success of Brexit, not try and frustrate last year’s referendum result. I urge all your readers who feel as I do to write to their MP and ask them to support the bill and honour the will of the people to leave the EU.

From: Harry Brooke, Leeds.

IT seems democracy has taken a back seat in Parliament when it comes to Brexit. Most of the millions who voted to leave the EU I suspect, felt betrayed the moment David Cameron did his disappearing act and left his old ‘Remain’ cronies to pick up the pieces.

Theresa May supports Cameron’s ridiculous edict that we give billions in foreign aid. Give us a Prime Minister who was on our side from the beginning and we might just see how ‘Brexit means Brexit’!

The former colonies did not have to pay a divorce settlement to gain independence from the British Empire, so why should we have to buy our independence from the EU?

From: Nick Martinek, Huddersfield.

THE EU’s single market does matter to the UK. Yet, at only about 10 per cent of UK GDP (our exports to the EU), it is worth far less to us than the rest of our economy. So it is rather strange that Labour in its latest u-turn should concentrate on the 10 per cent and not the 90 per cent. Under Labour we could end up with an unending transition deal – a fake Brexit.

Although Remainers are loathe to admit it, there is no doubt that the EU is effectively a protection racket. There are significant EU tariff barriers which favour the big corporates, such as German car makers (10 per cent on cars), at the expense of consumers.

Yet Labour has capitulated to the EU’s threats of punishments, thereby betraying it own Leave voters twice.

The real question is does the single market matter enough to give up our independence? The rest of the world doesn’t believe so. That is why countries have struggled for their independence throughout history. The UK 
has decided to follow suit. No more, no less. We are actually re-joining the rest of the world. Labour needs to re-think.

From: Robert Craig, Priory Road, Weston super Mare.

ENGLAND, like France, is a cobbled together country. It is made up of Inglelond (the land of the Angles) and Saxland. It is now sclerotic and badly malfunctioning.

It has to revert to English England (Inglelond) in the north and Saxland in the south. Inglelond arise!

Memories of the last train

From: Chris Moncrieff, Woodford Green, Essex.

YOUR correspondent Colin Foster is right: I am somewhat (to put it mildly) older than my byline photograph suggests. But I do clearly remember travelling on the last Harrogate to Pateley Bridge passenger train in 1951 as a reporter on the Harrogate Advertiser, my first employer.

However I apologise with all the contrition at my disposal for stupidly mixing up that event with Dr Beeching’s subsequent savage cuts which, as Mr Foster again correctly recalls, came some years later.