KONP gets two letters in the YEP

Leeds KONP members had two letters published in the Yorkshire Evening Post on March 17th – this may be a record! Dr John Puntis’s letter can be seen here and Gilda Peterson’s is below.

LAST Spring, when the sun shone and the roads were almost empty of traffic, we dared to hope that after all the suffering, there would be no return to a society where billionaire tycoons are feted while many health, care and other essential workers are poorly paid and undervalued; where gross inequalities are seen as “normal” and little done to stop destroying our planet.
Now we have Leeds City Council planning to plug an £87m funding gap by closing two of the few remaining local authority homes, including Richmond Court, which provided rehabilitation and respite care for older people and some of the eight million family and friends who prop up our inadequate, almost wholly privatised social care system.
A great opportunity for city children to try water sports at Yeadon Tarn is to be ditched and three community centres closed.

Let’s salvage something positive from the last year, refuse to accept cuts and poverty wages, defend our public services and insist on a fairer, very different tomorrow.

The budget offered nothing for Social Care while NHS staff, exhausted by a year of fighting to save our lives while covering 100,000 vacant posts, have been offered a miserly one per cent pay rise: a pay cut in real terms.
To add injury to insult, the Public Accounts Committee are insisting that the Government account for spending £37bn on a largely privatised and ineffective, test and trace system, propped up by private consultants on £6,000 per day!
Our local Public Health system, which is doing a brilliant job vaccinating our city, could have run an effective system at a fraction of the cost.
The Government’s fundamentalist belief that private is better than public, which flies in the face of all evidence, has also led to £millions being squandered on useless PPE.
Let’s salvage something positive from the last year, refuse to accept cuts and poverty wages, defend our public services and insist on a fairer, very different tomorrow.