Letters to the Editor, Lincolnshire Echo Wednesday, October 07, 2009
I read with interest your article (October 3) declaring that our Lincoln MP is “up for a fight” in the forthcoming General Election.
I also found the featured comments of the adopted Conservative candidate mournfully predictable.
Despite the local media’s focus on these two parties to the virtual exclusion of all others, it is important to remember that there is a third and very real option available to the voters of Lincoln – the Liberal Democrat, Reg Shore.
Are we to blindly accept a yo-yo election yet again where we are fooled into accepting the hollow promises of Labour and the Tories, despite the evidence of their repeated and catastrophic failures?The Conservatives are favourite to win this election but do we really expect them to be any different to previous administrations and give us any progress?
Conservatives will say anything to get elected but close inspection of their policies reveal the usual agenda of taking from the poor and giving to the rich, ie David Cameron would cut taxes for millionaires – at a cost to the country of £4.4bn – while doing nothing to help low earners.
Forty per cent of children in poverty live in one-parent households, yet the Tories’ tax credit reform proposals will only help couples while doing nothing for single parents.
Do the Conservatives (and Labour, for that matter) think that we have such short memories that we cannot remember the dreadful times that we have had under their last administration, which ended in disaster, as did the one before that and the one before that. Equally, Labour promises of a better world have left us all disillusioned, yet again.
The Liberal Democrats are in second position nationally and with a candidate of Mr Shore’s quality, could do very well indeed in Lincoln.
He is a skilled and proven council leader who recently won a startling victory over the Conservatives in the county council elections by taking part of the Lincoln parliamentary constituency from them.
Please let us be realistic – despite our MP’s fighting talk, she hasn’t got a prayer of taking the Lincoln seat in the next election; her own recent personal record and that of her failing Government have seen to that.
But the thought of a Conservative MP for Lincoln is an even worse option – the worst of all worlds.
We must not sleepwalk into a Conservative Government.
Jerry Parker, Lincoln.