Letters: May 5, 2016

Anonymity is granted only at the discretion of the editor, who also reserves the right to edit letters.

Our libraries are vital

A RANGE of views have been expressed on these pages about the council’s proposed 60 per cent cuts to the libraries budget.

There are those who believe libraries are an irrelevance in this digital age, which assumes that everyone can afford, and has access to digital devices and broadband.

What about those who don’t and rely on the library for access and support from the professional staff to apply for vital benefits, only accessible on-line? Others have mentioned ‘savings’ that would be better spent on other services.

The cuts are just that – not money that will be spent elsewhere.

However, the overwhelming views, not just here, but through petitioning, protests and a public meeting supported passionately by children’s authors, is that libraries are vital to maintain healthy and well connected communities.

They are free to access, free of stigma and discrimination, and are spaces where a variety of activities take place as well as the borrowing of books.

Councils have a duty to provide library services in accordance with the intent of the Public Libraries Act 1964.

I fail to see how the ‘emerging model’ will meet that requirement.

DEBORAH BUTLAND

Save Swindon’s Libraries campaign group

Windrush

Highworth

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Ken’s not anti-Semitic

A LUDICROUS piece on Radio 4 claimed Ken Livingstone had a record of anti-Semitic statements.

It claimed a paper he once edited published a cartoon featuring Israeli Prime minister Menachem Begin wearing a Fascist uniform standing on Palestinian corpses.

We were supposed to conclude that the cartoon was itself anti-Semitic.

But Begin explicitly based his terrorist gang on other Fascist organisations, complete with brown shirt and fascist salutes. Albert Einstein criticised Begin in exactly these terms.

The real story of Zionist history is, if anything, worse than Livingstone’s clumsy rendition.

On June 21, 1933, the Zionist Federation of Germany sent a memorandum supporting the Nazi Party in Germany.

Shortly after this the World Zionist Organisation voted down the Jewish boycott of Nazi Germany. During this conference Hitler announced an agreement with the World Zionist Organisation which broke the boycott.

Another terrorist group whose membership included Yitzhak Shamir (later Israeli Prime Minister) offered to fight on the Nazis side.

There is even a medal, struck by Goebel’s Der Angrif, commemorating the support given by the Zionist Jewish Agency in helping to make Germany “Judenfrei”, (apologies for quoting this nauseating word), with a star of David on one side and a swastika on the other.

Examples of sordid Zionist betrayals of Jewish people, even as the holocaust continued, are almost endless. The current pretence that opposition to Zionism is anti-Semitism, even where some of the fiercest critics of Zionism are Jews, is a smokescreen hiding the accelerating theft of Palestinian land by the racist state of Israel. There is growing international outrage at these thefts.

It is also an opportunist move by Blairite Tories in the Labour Party and their friends in Tory media.

PETER SMITH

Woodside Avenue, Swindon

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Make your mind up

THE referendum gets ever closer and people are still running around like chickens with their heads cut off. Make your mind up time is nearly here.

We know that there are many countries in the EU who do not like us Brits and will give us nothing by way of concessions.

This was proved after David Cameron’s jaunt around Europe trying to get some things changed. What did he get?

Nothing that they could not take back as soon as the referendum is done and dusted. All back to square one.

Then, in the very near future we have a load of other countries who are up for joining the EU.

Are these countries who can contribute to a successful EU or are they all poorer countries who want to jump on the bandwagon and get something for nothing?

They are: Albania, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Turkey. What are they going to contribute to the EU?

Albania, once the star of the Soviet Union. Serbia, which had civil war mostly comprised of Muslims fighting Christians not very long ago. Montenegro, next door to Serbia.

Macedonia, once a part of the Greek Empire until Greece decided that they didn’t want it.

Then we come to Turkey, is it East or West?

I know it’s where the two are supposed to meet. But is it a stable country and is it democratic?

Its open borders are allowing thousands, if not millions, of so called Islamic refugees into Europe.

When I say it is not democratic I refer of course to the Genocides that took place early in the last century at Smyrna. There they massacred some 1.5 million Greeks Armenians and Europeans. This is a conservative figure and other sources put the figures much higher.

This and the fact that the so-called refugees passing through Turkey are Islamic begs the question as to how many of those are in fact Isil or related terrorist groups?

If only one in every thousand is a terrorist it means that at least 1,000 terrorists have thus entered Europe.

Another good reason to vote to leave the EU.

That way we can bring back the border closures that we used to have.

Paraphrasing the words from the film The Life Of Brian: “What has Europe ever done for us?”

Robbed us blind would be the obvious answer to the tune of £350m a week.

With that we could build a lot of new hospitals and schools and, moreover, modernise our industries. You know it makes sense. So vote to leave.

DAVID COLLINS

Blake Crescent, Swindon

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TransAtlantic effect

THERE is a lot of controversy concerning the effect the proposed TransAtlantic Trade And Investment Partnership with the EU and USA will have on the UK’s NHS.

The NHS is not exempt from the treaty and it is basically for corporate entities to trade with each other.

Some say the NHS will be made a special case by the EU and will not be allowed to be privatised. But others say that it will, as the EU never gives long-term guarantees.

Indeed, the power to exclude is not in the hands of British politicians, but the EU and they will determine this fact after the TTIP is signed.

But one thing is for sure, if the UK was out of the EU, the NHS would stay in public hands.

It would be political suicide for any Party to decide the NHS was to be privatised.

Therefore it appears that the only way to conserve the NHS in public hands, is to vote out on June 23 as, left to the EU’s TTIP dictates, the NHS would in all probability eventually be privatised.

For the EU-US trade treaty makes it very clear, Monopolies just cannot exist and the NHS is the largest monopoly of services within one sector of the EU by far.

Therefore, the British people will have to think very carefully when they vote, as there are all manner of life-changing issues to take into account with the referendum vote. The survival of the NHS is just one.

DR DAVID HILL

CEO, World Innovation Foundation

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Watching Mercury

I THINK that some words went missing in your report of May 4, that “Swindon astronomy club ... has been granted permission by the National Trust to observe the next transit of Mercury, which will be visible in the UK in November 2019.”

Leaving aside the extremely strange notion that the National Trust should have any say as to who is or is not allowed to do astronomy, the next transit across the face of the Sun of the planet Mercury that can be seen from the UK will in fact be on Monday, May 9.

It takes place from 12.12 to 19.42 British Summer Time.

The one after that will be on November 11, 2019.

For information on observing these – and most especially on the safety precautions and equipment needed (the sun should not be looked at without a specially protected optical device) – see www.ras.org.uk/news-and-press/2822-rare-transit-of-mercury-to-take-place-on-9-may.

GERAINT DAY

Southampton Street, Swindon

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Eye-opening documentary

MAY I recommend a TV documentary which is to be shown on C4 on May 10 at 10pm entitled Children On The Front Line.

It tells the story of one family’s plight caught up in the horror of the Syrian conflict and their eventual escape to Germany.

None of us when we are born get to say in which country we will be raised.

Sometimes we take for granted our freedoms and opportunities here in the UK.

I complain about potholes and the state of the roads in Swindon, but this pales into insignificance compared to people’s lives in other countries.

I’m not religious, but the phrase ‘there but for the grace of God goes I’ comes to mind.

TOM HORWAT

Upavon Court, Swindon