PLEASE send your letters (as short as you like) to info@conservativewoman.co.uk and mark them ‘Letter to the Editor’. We need your name and a county address, eg Yorkshire or London. Letters may be shortened. There is no guarantee of publication.
***
No growth without fossil fuels
Dear Editor
How could any Chancellor have produced a Budget for growth when plentiful and reliable energy – the very fuel of economic success – has been legislated out of existence by green policies?
Britain is now incapable of industrial growth, with its attendant prosperity, having closed traditional and reliable sources of fossil and nuclear power in exchange for dependence on the vagaries of wind water and sun.
We must abandon these meaningless economic forecasts in favour of long-term weather reports, which are now much more relevant to our future growth.
Malcolm Parkin
Kinross
***
Why Gaza peace is impossible
Dear Editor
Would those calling for an immediate Gaza ceasefire have expected the Jews in Germany to do the same in the 1930s, rather than oppose the Holocaust?
Indeed it is hard to see how a lasting settlement can be achieved as long as Iran and its proxies are openly committed to the destruction of Israel and its people.
Surely this is not beyond the grasp of UN members.
Roger J Arthur
W Sussex
***
Exorbitant cost of Muslim memorial
Dear Editor
Blimey. £1,000,000 for a memorial to Muslims! How big will it be? ‘Public art’ is a racket I should have been in on long ago.
Twenty-five years ago, the veterans of the WW2 Glider Pilot Regiment, who trained at what is now Manchester Airport, asked me for ideas for a memorial to the Regiment at the gardens at the airport. I designed and made the memorial, below.
It cost hundreds of pounds. The old boys raised £700 themselves, and gave me £200. BAE let me use their workshop at Chadderton and lent me a truck.
Maybe I could have done something more elaborate, but I kept it simple and economical.
It’s still there and it’s religiously polished. I often visit the park whilst waiting for a flight.
Gary Lavin
***
Net Zero lies unravelling
Dear Editor
Politicians assured us that Net Zero would make us better off and have minimal impact on our standard of living. However, former International Monetary Fund chief economist Olivier Blanchard told the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee that there would be a ‘substantial fiscal cost to achieve anything close to Net Zero’ and that the public had not been told that Net Zero was going to be costly for them. British economist Sir Dieter Helm told the committee that it was ‘delusional to think that the Net Zero transition would pay for itself’. A report by the Institute for Community Studies (ICS), Trinity College Dublin, and the universities of Leeds and York have concluded that Net Zero measures will cause a rise in unemployment, push down living standards, food will become more expensive and that the poorest 40 per cent of households are at risk of falling into ‘transition poverty’. Proof that dishonesty is baked into politicians’ genes?
Clark Cross
Linlithgow
***
How could our impoverished military defend our fuel supply?
Dear Editor
There is much complaint regarding the almost total lack of funding for the British military. As an ex-soldier having taken part in several conflicts during the 1960s and 70s, I suggest that we have always been under-equipped, but the focus on being ready to fight at short notice – on sometimes several fronts – was always the driving force of everything we constantly trained for. No woke nonsense in those days.
Years of neglect from unfit for purpose government, combined with unnecessary, unaffordable, unachievable vanity projects, have starved Britain of vast amounts of money, reducing our forces to unsustainable levels. A letter to a national newspaper a few weeks ago hit the nail on the head. The author stated: ‘Russia, China and Iran spend billions on armaments – the UK spends billions on Net Zero.’ I might have added ‘and mass immigration’.
Like many other cases of government lack of forethought when launching targets without a viable plan for achievement, there has been a terrifying, highly dangerous void with regard to the defence of the nation, namely: as a net importer of energy, we have no energy security. If there is a European war, the enemy will easily be able to halt those supplies. Look at the chaos being caused by the Red Sea attacks, minor in scale compared with a major war. The country will close down – wind and solar won’t do it. Without energy imports, as well as our lights going out, everything that a country needs to function would stop.
I fear it is too late to repair the damage.
Trevor Anderson
***
Boris Johnson to blame for Ukraine disaster
Dear Editor,
We have been bombarded with pro-Ukrainian propaganda since Putin invaded in February 2022, and since Boris Johnson convinced Zelensky to turn down the peace deal on offer in Ankara two months later. We have been told that the Russians are stupid, they are running out of ammunition, Putin is seriously ill, Zelensky’s spring/summer/autumn offensive would retake Crimea, the Russians are using human wave attacks, and that Ukraine is a bastion of democracy defending freedom. Anyone who questions these narratives is branded a ‘Russian stooge’.
Taking that last point about ‘defending freedom’, this ‘democracy’ has cancelled presidential elections, banned all opposition parties, taken the media under state control, runs a brutal secret police, persecutes Orthodox Christians, is an arms bazaar, and advertises for foreign mercenaries – up to the age of 60, no military experience necessary. I doubt if a fraction of the millions of Ukrainians who have fled the country will want to return.
The war in Ukraine started in 2014, not 2022, after the elected president of Ukraine was deposed in a bloody coup in which the recently retired US state department official Victoria Nuland was heavily involved. When Ukraine’s Russian-speaking eastern province opted for self-rule in 2014 the Kiev government bombed and shelled them for seven years. According to the UN’s Office of High Commissioner for Human Rights reporting in February 2019, the total number of conflict-related casualties between Ukraine and the eastern provinces was 40,000-43,000 from April 14, 2014, to January 31, 2019, including 12,800-13,000 killed.
According to Colonel Douglas Macgregor, the US combat veteran and military strategist who has military contacts throughout Europe and Ukraine, the Russian army has been ‘moving slowly and deliberately’ to avoid casualties, and that Ukraine has lost between 400,000 and 420,000 killed plus between half a million and one million casualties. He states that Ukraine has already lost the war.
Increasingly, opinion in the United States is turning against the ‘as long as it takes’ narrative.
Yet our Foreign Secretary, Lord Cameron, has doubled down on support for Zelensky. ‘No country will be safe if Russia wins the war’ he claims, reprising the so-called domino effect of the Vietnam War. ‘We should be standing up for freedom,’ he says. Either Lord Cameron has insider knowledge that Nato is going to enter the war full-on, or he is just sucking up to the Biden executive to maintain the ‘special relationship’. When in the United States recently he urged Congress to send another $60billion to Ukraine. The ‘controversial’ Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene wasn’t kind to his Lordship in response when she said: ‘David Cameron needs to worry about his own country; frankly he can kiss my ass.’
If Boris Johnson had not visited Kiev two years ago none of this carnage would have happened. The deal was that Russia would withdraw to its position on February 23, when it controlled part of the Donbas region and all of Crimea, and in exchange Ukraine would promise not to seek Nato membership and instead receive security guarantees from a number of countries. Johnson’s hatred of Russia led to the disaster that followed. He is still at it, with a reported pay cheque of £1million a year for his weekly column in the Mail and more dosh for his forthcoming slot on GB News.
William Loneskie
Berwickshire