Readers' letters - December 16

What a brilliant strategy from the Post Office counter staff – holding the customers to ransom by holding virtually a week-long strike on the busiest week before Christmas.

The customers are already feeling hard done by with the price of postage stamps, so maybe we customers should also go on strike to protest over the inflated cost of postage stamps!

I know post office counter staff who are so miserable with doing their job now they want the customers (who they should be valuing a lot more) to also feel the ‘festive bah humbug spirit!’

If it isn’t the Post Office going on strike, it’s the Royal Mail!

Or both of them together.

They are also whingeing that hardly anyone is sending Christmas cards.

Can they not see why people have stopped buying their postage stamps?

They’re too expensive.

Me thinks the Government, the Royal Mail and the Post Office are “colluding” and every time they see an opportunity, they hike up the prices of their postage stamps.

Where’s the logic in this?

Oh well, if I can’t change things for the better, I’ll just say a Merry Christmas Humbug to the Royal Mail and the Post Office counter staff.

Thanks for disrupting our letters, Christmas cards, and our parcels the week before Christmas.

From Ebenezer Scrooge!

Darryl Ashton

Blackpool

traffic

My first fine in 40 years

I have lived in Preston all my life and driven for 40 years with no accidents or penalties on the road.

Today I have received a £60 fixed penalty demand for driving down Fishergate, past Primark and the Fishergate Centre.

As I have driven that way all my life, I was at a loss as to what I had done wrong.

I went into Preston to see what I had done wrong. I was just following other cars and today scores of cars are doing the same.

I came across a new road sign on the passenger vehicle side of the road, just past Mount Street, saying Fishergate was now a bus lane between 11am and 6pm.

There were no signs warning of this change, as with other bus lanes, and many, many drivers were driving through. They will all be hammered.

This is just a complete joke and rip off.

At the very least there should be a sign on the drivers’ side of the road as well.

How can anyone concentrate on road signs with pedestrians running across in front of you and shoppers walking close

by?

It’s an absolute disgrace.

I am writing to the council and my MP.

Steve Eccles

Penwortham

brexit

EU dilemma’s Tories’ fault

Can the present dilemmas which now face the Conservative Government and whose costs will be borne by the British people, be attributable to any group other than the Conservative Party?

In the early days (1973) of our membership of the EEC, the Conservative Party suffered divisions over our membership.

These were to continue unchecked, through the Maastricht days and right up to and after the recent referendum.

In serving its own interests, for instance a desire to hold on to power, the Conservative (and Unionist) Party in Parliament has failed the United Kingdom on a number of counts.

Successive leaders failed to discipline those who kicked against party policy on Europe.

Even John Major’s basic Anglo-Saxon terminology didn’t do the trick.

If these divisions remain as severe as recent top Tories have claimed, there were two honourable options facing the party – leadership to expel the Eurosceptics and/or the option for the Eurosceptics to break and form a new party.

After all, the Social Democrats, Jenkins, Owen, Rodgers and Williams, showed them how to do it.

Economists are now firing up prophecies of doom – and still the Conservatives unashamedly sit tight in Westminster, amusing themselves with political party games, even the new PM.

Terry Marston

Address supplied

welfare

Dark truth

We are often described as a nation of animal lovers. It would be more accurate to say we are a nation of pet lovers (mainly dogs, cats and budgies), because we kill millions of animals every year.

(And I suspect we have not been told the truth about some aspects of factory farming).

We humans exploit animals for our own ends, so we should stop sentimentalising ourselves.

Television gets almost everywhere, these days, but they don’t seem to get much access to our largely secret treatment of animals.

I am not a veggie but I did stop eating beef, lamb and rabbit years ago.

And I am from an old-style farming background.

Max Nottingham

Address supplied

humour

Condiments of the season

I lunched today in the café of a department store.

When the waitress brought me my meal, she asked if I would like salt and pepper.

She was thus offering me condiments of the season.

I realise that I hadn’t enough money to pay, so I dashed to a nearby cash machine.

There I was showered in cinders.

Then I realised it was

a freak ash withdrawal

ATM.

Neil Swindlehurst

Walmer Bridge

lottery

Fund lifeboats instead of art

Lottery funding going to the ‘arts’ is an utter waste of money, especially when you look at what is considered art by those who select items of ‘art’.

I have visited several art galleries and find many of the items utter rubbish.

They have very little

or no artistic value whatsoever.

A five-year-old could do better.

The air ambulance saves lives, as do the lifeboats, and yet they have to rely on charity.

It does not add up in my estimation.

The Lottery could, and should, make a donation to both of the above to gain some credibility.

Peter Hyde

Address supplied