Readers' letters - February 21

Fore more letters: https://www.lep.co.uk/news/your-say/readers-letters-february-19-1-9033306Is this justice?

I noted there was a challenge at the Royal Courts of Justice, in January of this year, to the established formula for deciding the costs landlords/investment companies can charge property owners for extending their leases or selling the freehold titles to them which they hold.

This leaseholder of a property in London wanted to extend his lease. The freeholder wanted to charge them £420,000.

The leaseholder lost their case with the Lord Justices deciding in favour of the freeholder.

This judgement continues to keep the cash door open for the investment companies, which have snapped up leasehold and freehold titles for the sole purpose of making money from the property owners if they try to purchase them in the future.

It would be interesting to know what kind of criteria the Justices used in determining their judgement.

This case gave an opportunity for some kind of reasonable method of calculation to be recommended to curb the excesses of investment companies.

The judgement will have implications for any property owners in future.

They will have to pay the extortionate charges demanded by these companies or go down the costly route of an appeal.

So, if in future any property owners wishing to purchase these items wonder why they are so expensive, they should blame the Lady and Lord Justices of the Royal Courts of Justice. So much for justice – what justice?

Syd Bullen

via email

society

Suffragettes’ ‘absurd antics’

The Suffragettes were a clique of upper middle-class women who had nothing better to do than pursue a bogus martyrdom through warped ‘heroics’.

They were disorderly, a threat to life and property, and an embarrassment to many women.

The magnificent Millicent Fawcett’s Suffragists were vastly better with their debates and protest marches based upon logic and rationality.

Unfortunately, their

case was destroyed by the absurd antics of the Suffragettes.

The real cause of women’s votes emerged at the end of the First World War.

With civil unrest breaking out in may parts of Europe, it was considered that all men should be rewarded with a full franchise on the grounds that they had suffered greatly during the war and deserved a say in the selection of a democratic Government.

Equally, it could not be denied that the women of Great Britain had taken their share of the burden that had led to victory.

The women of Britain had worked in the munitions factories, they had served close to the front line as nurses, and joined the women’s branches of the armed forces.

They had ‘manned’ trams and trolley buses, worked in the fields, and assisted the police

as ‘Volunteer Women Patrols.’

By the end of the war, the case in favour of women’s franchise was unanswerable.

Although it took two steps to gain full voting rights for women, it should be remembered that the universal franchise amongst men took many centuries.

Furthermore, to push the achievements of those wonderful wartime women into the background in

order to promote the anti-social activities of the Suffragettes is an offensive misuse of the historic facts and should be abandoned immediately.

E C Coleman

via email

language

Pensions are not benefits

Reading a letter about “how a simple word change can have a devastating effect” triggered the memory bank (LP Letters, Language being used to belittle us, February 15).

Not so long ago someone contacted the DWP, pointing out that the pension was not a benefit, it was an entitlement duly paid for.

Someone at the DWP must have spent a great deal of time ploughing through every dictionary they could put their hands on to extract a definition to support the DWP’s “pensions are a benefit”. The reply was long and ‘proved’ that, as usual, the DWP was correct.

You have to read the definition in Merriam-Webster’s dictionary very carefully to realise that “a benefit” (noun)is, as correspondent Trudy Baddams says, a perk (you don’t pay for it directly).

When you pay into a pension scheme, you are entitled to get what you have paid in for. You personally are “to benefit”, (verb), from paying in. It is beneficial to pay into a pension scheme.

A play on words? Yes, but our argument is as good as, (or better) than theirs! My old mum refused to ask for other “benefits” as she considered them as “charity”. She accepted the pension because she had paid in for it. I think everyone should challenge the government for referring to the pension as a benefit. The government says “in reality, there is no fund you pay into”.

They say tax payers would pay for uprating frozen pensions. Does that not suggest the NIS pension scheme no longer exists?

Name and address supplied