Dear Editor,

CAN anybody explain the periodic brutalising of the London plane trees in Wellington Park?

It leaves a row of ugly trees in an otherwise pretty park.

All presumably at ratepayers’ expense.

David Powell

Wellington

Dear Editor,

Donna Pollak was right to remind us of the huge £90-billion legacy reported in signing up to Brexit to leave the European Union, engineered by the hard right of the Tory party, and its misinformation. Previous PM Boris Johnson was obsessed with ‘getting Brexit done’. Putin rubbed his hands in glee that the UK would become weaker once it had distanced itself from its allies in Europe. Brexit had occupied Boris’ mind, when he should have concentrated his thinking and that of his MPs in dealing with the pandemic in the same year 2020. But Boris was the first to support Ukraine after Putin’s invasion.

The recent detailed report from Baroness Hallett confirmed what many of us had come to believe about the consequences of the COVID enquiry. The virus was not recognised until March 2020.

From March 2020 the discombobulation in No 10 was well recorded by the press in the increasing numbers of untimely deaths which could have been avoided and left lasting painful memories for families.

The pandemic cost us taxpayers millions of wasted money, paid to wealthy private contractors, providing faulty PPE uniforms.

We now have a new Labour government elected with a huge majority, composed of cabinet ministers with little or no experience of growing the country’s economy, and new naive MPs full of self importance, adding mistakes to those of the previous government. As one spokesman said, when you have a big landslide, there are those who think they won their seat because they are a genius, and can deeply undermine party loyalty. What a huge price we are paying in the Budget for these expensive mistakes from past and present governments. Can PM Keir Starmer help the UK to work more closely as neighbours with a fractious EU across the Channel on defence and security as Putin plays for time.

Isabel Ward

Wellington

Dear Editor,

Once again I feel compelled to write in protest at the overall tone of your latest Editorial piece which is clearly linked to the November 28 front page story about the Wellington Flower Show and Carnival groups who are struggling to find voluntary help to keep going, which is true.

What is not true is that - and I quote directly from the piece - "Wellington people have stopped volunteering" which is a statement so far divorced from the truth that it is as ludicrous as it is blinkered, unkind and desperately ill-informed. One only has to leaf through the pages of this very same newspaper week in and week out, to see stories of the myriad volunteers who are running food banks, staffing winter warm spaces, helping young people's groups and sports clubs, putting on public entertainment be it drama or music etcetera, not to mention the magnificent efforts of our Transition Town gardening group who have actually just won a prestigious national award from the Royal Horticultural Society, no less, on the backs of their voluntary helpers, bravo!

So...the lazy conclusion being drawn in the sneeringly negative tone of the statement, "Wellington folk are more concerned with social media influencing others than giving some of their time for others" appalls me in its unwarranted superficiality, regardless of what Queen Victoria might have said or thought a very long time ago. She died in 1901.

Where the piece is, in fact, correct is in the assertion that the world has changed hugely in the last half-century with the inevitable demographic implications which undoubtedly do affect patterns of social behaviour and lie behind the real reasons some of our town organisations are struggling to recruit newcomers. People are in work for longer to pay off huge mortgages which can no longer be serviced on one breadwinners' salary, social care is in crisis along with our health services by no fault of its own making, and many people are full-time carers for instance, while countless others look after grand-children while both parents work etcetera; all just straightforward facts of everyday modern life but which, grouped together, add up to all kinds of pressures on peoples' time which simply weren't there 20, 30 or 50 years ago.

As to social media channels and the Internet; yes, it is well-documented both have had some negative effects on society, but it is also true that the new technology has brought together huge numbers of like-minded people for good and positive purposes as well, both locally and further afield.

You can do better than this; why not actually use your pages and journalistic skills to encourage people to volunteer who might not have thought of it before?

JF Pocock

Wellington