AS A benefits claimant with, I’d like to think, a social conscience, I am most dismayed at Kirklees Council’s decision to implement the tax rises which are targeted at the poor.

Though my own finances have not (yet) been affected, I am concerned that others will face excruciating poverty and possible eviction, even homelessness.

Cutting the Council Tax benefit for those claiming Jobseekers’ Allowance is a cruel policy.

Effectively the government and the council are blaming and punishing the poorest among us for a recession largely caused by rich bankers and deepened by public sector job cuts imposed nationally and locally.

In support of Kirklees’ Axe the Tax campaign, I and several friends, have collected 106 signatures on a petition against the similarly cynical “bedroom tax.”

For the council to make a deduction from the housing benefit paid to those in social housing deemed to have a spare room is hypocritical when the richest among us – including the government’s own ministers who concocted this measure – have not only spare bedrooms but spare houses.

Poor people accept the housing they are offered and ‘our’ council intends to demolish two blocks of one-bedroom flats so Tesco can build on the site.

RENE THOMAS

Marsh

My Yorkshire shame

FOR the first time in my life I have been ashamed to belong to a Yorkshire where people dance in the street and celebrate the death of a democratically elected Prime Minister.

Margaret Thatcher was not a Saddam Hussein. The miners were not the only ones losing their jobs. After serving seven years in the navy, my husband worked in a woollen mill for 26 years which was closed, along with most of the others in our town. After being unemployed for a while, aged 50 he found work through a friend as postman – a job he would never have expected to do in a month of Sundays.

Even after the Tory government was voted out, Labour in all its 12 years in office, did nothing to replace the mills, mines, steel and engineering works in Yorkshire. We became an economic wilderness.

So do not put all the blame for all the wrongs of the land on Margaret Thatcher and do not put her on the same level as Saddam Hussein and others like him, whose effigies were burnt because they were tyrants and murderers.

MRS N CLARKE

Almondbury

Youth of today

WHAT on earth is up with our youth of today.

The mindless, smashing of cars at Meltham, schools vandalised, allotments wrecked, cricket pavilions set on fire and just lately three youths kicked a man who was sleeping rough to death.

These are just a few incidents which could fill a newspaper on its own. Whatever is causing this disgraceful behaviour is appalling.

Is it broken relationships where a new face appears on the scene and the kids are left out of the equation? Is it drugs? Are schools leaving a lot to be desired? Is it violent video games?

Whatever, it is it needs to be addressed before we become the next victim.

Schools were once a no-go zone for bad behaviour.

Sadly the many who are well behaved get bunched in with the bad ones.

W BUTLER

Meltham

Murder theory

WE will never know for sure whether or not Alfred Moore shot two police officers in 1951.

In 1969 while out bird watching near Kirkheaton, I got to know a man who had been visiting the area on summer afternoons since 1945. Before this, he had manned a Home Guard observation post and retained his issued binoculars, long after it became obvious that the German paratroopers weren’t coming.

In 1947 from Carr Mount he said he saw a farmer dropping articles through rabbit diggings, into long disused mine workings, near what later became the murder scene.

When he noticed police paying covert attention to a nearby farm house he suspected that he had seen the farmer disposing of unwanted stolen property.

He realised, in 1951, that the farmer was called Alfred Moore, when his picture appeared in the Dewsbury Reporter.

In 1970, Harry Woodhead, who was still living on the next farm, told me his version of events, as did retired detective Basnett, who was my driving instructor in 1971 and who had attended the farm on the day in question.

All three versions were very similar, but each had a different theory as to what happened to the gun, which was never found.

It is possible that the gun, possibly wrapped in a silk scarf, was dropped into old mine workings, near the murder scene, at the time.

The long disused mine shaft, very near the murder scene, is clearly marked on the 1935 map in Huddersfield reference library.

The gun may still be recoverable, using modern geophysics and fibre optic technology.

STEPHEN PRIEST

Huddersfield

What about my idea?

I AM writing with regard to the article on Thursday, April 18 in the Examiner about the callous robbery of the young man on Tuesday, April 15 at 6.30pm on Castle Hill.

I actually wrote a letter back in February with regard to Kirklees College and the waste of money lighting up the (Ocean Liner) new building.

I actually said that I would much rather see Victoria Tower on Castle Hill bathed in light and due to the stupidity of those who destroyed the grass while driving their vehicle all over the area.

I stated that it would be beneficial for Kirklees to install security cameras on each side of the tower to catch these idiots and anyone fly tipping on the hill. If any of the Kirklees councillors had read my letter and acted upon it the police would have the evidence of the vehicle’s licence plate number and the description of those involved all recorded by the cameras.

Sadly another good idea put forward by a member of the public, but another chance missed by Kirklees Council to do something positive about the hill.

Keith Bagot

Honley

Closing hospitals

YEARS ago we lost Mill Hill Hospital and Storthes Hall and then we saw the closing down of St Luke’s, leaving us with only one hospital for Huddersfield, even though Huddersfield now has a much bigger population than we had 10 years ago! The closing down of our hospitals in my opinion is stupid and those who are making these decisions may one day regret their actions of closing these hospitals.

H BARROWCLOUGH

Waterloo