'Too many homeless people on our streets'

You can tell it's pantomime season.
Are you concerned about homelessness?Are you concerned about homelessness?
Are you concerned about homelessness?

The Conservative Party has been trying to get rid of the Prime Minister, Theresa May, and she has been campaigning not to lose her job.

Reportedly, some MPs have been reduced to tears.

It’s a shame then that those same MPs can’t shed some tears as they walk past the homeless people on the streets of this country.

They are everywhere.

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A large number are ex-service men and women, who served this country with far more bravery and dignity than all those MPs put together, put on the streets by this Government’s policies.

Now the bureau of investigative journalism has began to collate evidence of those who have died while homeless in October 2017.

Now, a little more than a year on, 484 deaths have been recorded.

One Tory MPs said sleeping rough is a lifestyle choice – who could vote for that person?

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Like millions of people in Britain, I’ve seen this all before. Many of us remember the rising numbers of homeless people in the 1980s and 90s as Thatcherite economic restructuring ripped through the nation.

Since the Conservatives came back into power in 2010, we have the same thing happening but this time we have the homeless being assaulted all too regularly.

The Conservative Party has 124,000 members and I struggle to understand how these 124,000 can fail to recognise their party’s culpability.

Ged Taylor

Address supplied

brexit

Proof is in the eating

The current Brexit impasse and clamour for another referendum have prompted the launch of liberalbrexiteers.com, which revisits the case for Brexit from a liberal point of view and endeavours to reassure the majority who voted for Brexit two years ago that we took the right decision to leave the EU.

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liberalbrexiteers.com portrays the EU as an outdated 19th century notion, an idea whose time has gone, left behind by advances in communications which have rendered geography in politics irrelevant.

Further, it suggests that the EU will be an international irrelevance by 2050, thanks to shrinking market share, GDP and population.

Our future international relations must be less focused on the seven per cent of the world’s population who live in the EU and more with the 93 per cent who do not.

Calls for another Brexit ballot are wrong-headed.

The last referendum cost £137m, lasted four months and was divisive.

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A second referendum and/or a third general election in the space of four years will achieve nothing other than accentuate these divisions.

Moreover, another referendum subverts the democratic rule that we vote in the light of our experience, on the understanding that we may vote differently in a following ballot if things do not work out.

We have to experience Brexit first before we can make a judgement.

We can always decide to renew our membership of the EU in the future if our experience of Brexit indicates that our leaving was a mistake, but the proof of the Brexit pudding is in the eating, not in endless speculation about how palatable it will be.

So we don’t need another ballot.

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We just need Parliament to do what we told them to do after they decided to ask us what we wanted.

Lib Dem, Labour and Conservative politicians started this hare running in 2015 when they united to vote for a referendum.

They must unite now to deliver Brexit.

David Green

A Liberal Brexiteer

Science

Sort our world first

Soon we are going to have less fuzzy pictures of a big rock four billion miles from Earth.

Although I am a science enthusiast, I wonder if we should first at least also look inwards.

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The photos of ex-planet Pluto are fantastic and probably quite meaningful to a few people - although to most they probably could be mistaken for moon photos.

It was suggested that we have explored more of outer space than our oceans, which seems strange but may actually be true.

We should first see what we have, especially as we are making a pretty good effort to destroy it.

The purpose of science is many-fold, including learning more about how big rocks, a long way away, rotate, but its first purpose should be to make the human condition better.

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We still have so many things to achieve here, starting with the challenging - feeding the masses, through to the difficult - curing many diseases, and then the seemingly impossible - stopping climate change.

The rock has been around for at least four billion years so we could wait a few more centuries and get a great Instagram shot later.

Let’s sort out our own world and then go and check out the neighbours later.

Dennis Fitzgerald

via email