Readers' letters - July 17

Another great restaurant closes (Curry out of favour? LP July 12).

I was brought up around the (Spice of Bengal) Bengal restaurant, as it was originally called in the 1960s.

My mother used to clean there and my sister and brother and myself loved going there.

When I worked as a doorman at the Top Rank in the mid 1970s, after a shift, a few of the staff used to go there for a meal.

After leaving Preston to serve in the Armed Forces, my family returned to Preston and again enjoyed further meals there.

In fact, a couple of the staff remembered me from 22 years ago.

I for one will miss this restaurant.

Apart from the Kismet, it was the best Indian restaurant in Preston, and both have played a culinary part of my life for over 40 years.

Over the years, the decline in Friargate trade has sadly caused the loss of many of the businesses there, Jumbos Corner comes to mind.

Margaret Mason is now the longest remaining shop of what has always been called ‘The forgotten Friargate’, mostly blamed on the new road running through it, cutting Friargate in two. A sad end to an excellent restaurant.

Michael Wareing 
snr

via email

politics

We need a new dynamic leader

I am a Labour supporter and I’m no fan of Jeremy Corbyn.

He claims to represent the Labour movement when in fact he is a communist.

He said he is going to create a new and different, kinder politics and he has badly damaged the Labour Party, despite doing well at the recent general election.

His comrades see him as an honest, decent and a principled man but they just don’t get it at all. He is a hypocrite.

Jeremy Corbyn is a supporter of political correctness and mass immigration. Those affected by mass immigration are the working class, the people who he is supposed to be standing up for.

Jeremy Corbyn has allowed anti-semitism into the Labour Party and his supporters threatened Angela Eagle and other moderate MPs in the party for disagreeing with his style of leadership.

This sort of behaviour is similar to what happened in Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany. Is this the new and different, kinder politics?

Before New Labour’s landslide election victory in 1997, Arthur Scargill formed his own left-wing party called the Socialist Labour Party because he didn’t like Tony Blair’s style of leadership.

Why didn’t Jeremy Corbyn join that party?

He voted against the party’s policies 500 times.

The Labour Party needs a dynamic, youthful figure with the qualities of John Smith, Harold Wilson and Clement Attlee as leader who supports both business and the workers. It’s the only way it will win back power.

GPS

Address supplied

society

Pay cap hitting the economy

In his letter (LP July 10), Mr Tagg makes the common mistake of thinking that running the economy of the nation is similar to running the economy of a family home.

This is not the case.

Unless you have a high-quality printing press in your cellar, you cannot produce money on demand, whereas a government can.

Witness the half a trillion pounds worth of money that has been created as part of the quantitative easing programme since 2009.

How, and to whose benefit, that money is

spent is a matter of political choice.

Householders do not have the ability to recover money that they have spent by imposing taxes: the Government does.

Most of the money spent on the NHS and Education is in the form of wages and these are taxed at source through PAYE, so more than 30 per cent returns straight away to the Treasury.

Much of what remains is spent (incurring VAT) in local shops and businesses, which pay taxes in their own turn. This boosts the local economy and, for every pound spent on these public services, the economy benefits by more than four pounds.

This effect is known as the ‘fiscal multiplier’.

The public sector pay-cap, which is in its seventh year, is not only causing needless suffering to public servants and their families, it is making it harder for the local economy to recover.

It is not cost-effective to run the NHS on temporary staff, but it does make NHS Professionals, the in-house staffing agency which the Government is in the process of selling off to private investors, a more attractive commercial proposition.

We all need to remember that the financial crash of 2007/8 was not caused by over-spending on public services, but by deregulation and greed in the (private) financial services.

Colin Hutchinson

via email

lottery

Large lotto wins benefits causes

The gist of Barry Foster’s letter crops up at intervals (LP July 14).

What he, and others on the same theme, don’t know, is that, as the top prize in the National Lottery ‘rolls over’, it increases the number of hopefuls, benefitting good causes.

Some years ago, our Lotto rolled over to exceed £100m.

The outcry at the ‘huge’ payout led to a rewrite of the rules to impose a limit on the number of rollovers, and the maximum prize was ‘fiddled’.

The cash input into our National Lottery dropped immediately, depriving the benefitting good causes of income for years.

What the winner, or winners, do with large amounts of cash is their choice.

A near half-page advert for an international draw, in that same issue of the Lancashire Post (July 14), was pushing the possibility of an enormous payout of £100m plus.

Who would benefit from the profits generated?

Not British good causes.

What is Barry’s attitude to that?

The odds against any individual winning that prize must exceed the possible prize (in sterling) by some margin.

Nobody is coerced into gambling on anything. Mugs such as I, resist most of the time.

An irregular Lotto entrant

Fulwood