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Show quiet dignity

AROUND the world zebra crossings have been painted in rainbow colours in support of the LGBT community - will Swindon be the next place to do this?

Swindon and Wiltshire Pride fully support the idea as the group believes it demonstrates a change in perceptions and helps raise awareness of LGBT issues. One suggestion was even more radical - painting the Magic Roundabout in the rainbow colours.

Spokeswoman for Swindon & Wiltshire Pride Lydia Lawrence said: “The crossing could be a way of celebrating diversity in Swindon and raising awareness about the issues still faced by the lesbian, gay, bisexual and the transgender community.

There is a definition in the Highway Code and the Road Traffic Manual that defines the markings, so let’s keep it that way! Please stop ramming this LGBT cause down our throats because I am sick to death of it all. Everywhere we go we have to put up with people promoting gay issues. One celebrity is gay, so many others want to be gay. They can’t wait to mention ‘My same sex husband’.

Just get on with your lives in the quiet manner that it should be and don’t take up valuable newspaper space with a cause that most people don’t care about.

I believe in you running your lives how you want to - in quiet dignity.

I have friends who are gay but they do the right thing: offer their friendship to others without disclosing any other personal issues.

Just leave road markings alone and for what they are there for.

Chris Gleed, Proud Close, Purton

This will run and run

I always take great interest in the pronouncements of Coun Garry Perkins, not least because they are generally, as opposed to genuinely, quite amusing. His latest aside is worthy of comment (SA 21 July). Coun Perkins states with all the seriousness he can muster that “No development happens in just 12 months”. Not surprisingly no one suggested it did, it’s just his way of attempting to deflect attention from the administrations failings.

It was in 2008 that Muse Developments signed a contract to build what was then known as Exchange. As the years passed so to did the name of the development, its second incarnation was Union Square and latterly Kimmerfields. Coun Perkins was fulsome in his praise of the deal done with Muse. Indeed he was so taken with the commercial potential that he claimed “It will create investment confidence in Swindon town centre and it will attract residential occupiers back into the town centre”. Ten years later, not 12 months, the much vaunted cry of a former Council leader ‘we will build and they will come’ can be seen for what it was – wholly unsubstantiated rhetoric.

As for whether the town centre deserves the appellation ‘desolate’, consider the verdict of business leaders as published in a Council sponsored report - “Swindon is in a highly competitive position, but its major business occupiers are unhappy with the town centre environment”.

For Di Powell to feel it’s unhelpful for people to speak the truth demonstrates the extent that denial of the real situation is alive and well in the organisation charged with improving the town centre. Which begs the question – what hope for change is there?

Des Morgan, Caraway Drive, Swindon