Our readers from across the county give their weekly take on the biggest issues impacting Kent and beyond.
Some letters refer to past correspondence which can be found by clicking here. Join the debate by emailing letters@thekmgroup.co.uk
Use empty homes before building more
According to government data, the number of people sleeping rough in England is 3,898.
Rough sleeping has increased by more than a quarter for two years in a row.
The largest increase was in London where there were 1,132 people in 2023, compared with 858 people in 2022.
Past and present governments have failed to tackle the problem of homelessness, despite the fact that there are more than a million homes lying empty in England and Wales.
In the midst of a housing crisis, hundreds of thousands of people are dwelling in often substandard, insecure temporary accommodation.
If empty homes were requisitioned to be used as living spaces, it would be more beneficial to the environment than building the equivalent in new constructions.
Moreover, high levels of empty properties can have a detrimental effect on communities as it increases acts of vandalism, which diminishes the properties’ appeal.
Michael Smith
Opposing woke ideology is not ‘far right’
The terms Left and Right in politics originated during the French Revolution, when members of the National Assembly divided into supporters of the previous regime to the president’s right, and supporters of the revolution to his left.
This may have been appropriate at the end of the 18th Century but it is far from so now, as in a world containing inter alia, anarchists, Marxists, Nazis, socialists, fundamentalists, conservatives, nihilists and the apathetic, such categorisation fails to describe the reality.
For example the National Socialist German Workers Party was a product of the streets, led by a rabidly anti-capitalist fanatic, but the Nazis are always regarded as being rightwing, when in fact they, as well as the Soviet Union, were from the violent left.
In contemporary society, much of the media treats people with genuine conservative views as being on the right, but then conflates, and thereby confuses, their position with that of the fascists.
People with real conservative views support an orderly society, where often a benign religion, a respect for authority, and for each other, is the norm, as is having a pride in their country and its achievements.
Unfortunately the modern left, acting via the BBC, has taken to referring to anyone who does not subscribe to the rampant woke ideology as either ‘far right’, or ‘hard right’. This even extends to referring to the government of a state such as Israel as rightwing, apparently believing that the victims of the Holocaust have something in common with its perpetrators.
Someone such as myself, a law-abiding patriot, who attends church every week, supports the monarchy, loves my country, and stands up for the right of the Jewish people to have their own state, but who dares to oppose such things as transgender ideology, illegal immigration, abortion, and the absurdity of net zero, is pigeonholed by the BBC as being in the same category as the fascists.
I have no doubt that this is a deliberate falsification of the facts in order to smear those that they oppose, and is a betrayal of any concept of our national broadcaster being impartial.
Colin Bullen
Delay to devolution a blow to Kent
The Labour government is claiming that growth is the key to solving all the nation’s economic woes on taxing and spending.
However, to enable greater growth, decisions have to be made and not kicked into the long grass by functionaries and politicians.
So it is with local government restructuring and devolution.
Angela Rayner marches all the councils in Kent to the top of the hill to view devolution from afar, and a few weeks later says ‘not for you’.
We are left then with a rag bag of old failing two-tier councils that constantly charge more for doing less, who are now left to struggle on with no hope of improvement.
What this means is more pointless cuts to library services, household waste sites, potholes, bus services and children’s services. The most deprived areas will suffer the most, with congestion, fewer bus services, worn-out infrastructure, fly-tipping and less early intervention with children in need of help.
Hardly a recipe for growth.
Of course, some will view the prospect of elections as a good thing, mainly because they think their side will win seats. However, if the result turns out to be no overall control, and no one will work together, what will that achieve?
So Ms Rayner, if you have any more good ideas, please keep them to yourself, unless you intend to take some action.
Inaction is what is most damaging to our economic future, not a lack of growth.
Richard Styles
Answer to airport expansion lies in Kent
It would seem that Britain has turned into a Third World country as far as our archaic planning systems are concerned.
They drag on endlessly, sometimes for years and years. Take for example the article saying that a rare butterfly could scupper plans for the £250m A229 Bluebell Hill road improvement.
Now we hear that the boss of Ryanair stated that it could be 25 years before a third runway can be built at Heathrow. What are they using – knives and forks?
Does it not occur to those governing our country that just outside Ramsgate is an airport (Manston) standing empty with the second longest runway in the UK. With most of the London railway stations serving Kent, it would not take much to spur the high-speed trains into Manston at far less cost that a new runway at Heathrow.
That’s providing the planning departments can overcome the Nimby’s who have always complained about noise.
Are these the same people who are quite happy to go on holiday and make a noise at Gatwick, and Stansted, as long as it’s not in their back yard?
Sid Anning
Lawyers won’t let us cut migration
Mark Kennett wishes he knew how the people smuggling across the Channel and the consequent loss of life could be stopped (letters last week).
The government thinks the answer is to “smash the gangs”, although all the evidence suggests that smuggling gangs are like Hydra, cut off one head and another will grow; we have seen that with drug gangs, stopping one merely allows another to expand to fill the market space vacated.
The last government had the beginnings of an idea, to deport the illegal migrants and that would dissuade others from following. It may have been working to some extent but it was always going to fall foul of the “rule of lawyers” and the idea that international laws trump national ones.
For us in the west the problem is that we have an enormous economic pull factor, people can enter Western countries illegally, then work illegally, sending significant funds home to families and eventually enabling their families to join them.
To stop the illegal migrants we must therefore stop them earning, difficult to do in an unregulated society with no formal ID and does anybody believe IDs would be checked every time somebody used a car wash or ordered home delivery from takeaway?
The answer then has to be that we stop the illegal immigrants before they get jobs and established, or vanish into the black economy.
That then has to mean intercepting them and keeping them in secure accommodation whilst they are processed; it also means that we must toughen up the criteria on which we allow illegal migrants to remain.
So many claims for asylum are allowed it undermines the system. Whatever we do we are going to fall foul of international laws written for another time, addressing the problems that are not those with which we are struggling.
Eventually we are going to have to grasp the nettle and amend and rescind laws and obligations that fetter us unnecessarily but with a lawyer as PM that will not happen anytime soon.
Bob Britnell
How to break the smuggling gangs
I wonder how long our government is going to allow the French to treat us as idiots.
As it stands, the French border force is being given a vast amount of money, by us, to make a pretence of guarding their borders. There are criminals working on their soil, causing migrants to risk their lives endeavouring to reach our shores by whatever means possible.
How can the French be sure that, besides the innocent victims, there are not any criminals being transported if they are not carrying out customs checks?
As I see it the only way to end this traffic is to provide a safe route by having application forms available which can be vetted by British Embassy staff and if passed migrants could even be given free passage, with accommodation already lined up.
Anyone arriving here from a safe country without papers should be immediately returned and the cost charged to the customs department of that country.
If this were to be implemented, then trafficking should be reduced to a minimum. There would be no point in potential migrants staying close to the channel, so reducing the problems of overcrowding.
I know this would mean tearing up some agreement but migration would not be stopped, only controlled.
The numbers of migrants accepted should be determined by the government, not the vagaries of the weather or the greed of the traffickers.
Brian Barnard
Violence against women must not be ignored
A recent report from the National Audit Office records the shocking fact that reports of violence against women and girls (VAWG) accounted for a staggering 20% of all police-recorded crime in 2022-23 and there is no reason to believe that figure has been reduced since then.
In addition it noted that in England and Wales there was an average delay of 158 days or over five months in rape cases, between police referral and a charge from the Crown Prosecution Service, whereas for all crimes it is 46 days.
All of this is against a background of what the report described as an ‘epidemic of violence against women and girls’.
Four years ago, the then Conservative government, launched a major response after the murders of Sabina Nessa and Sarah Everard, which, in the event, proved to be a shambles with those government departments tasked with delivering progress lacking a clear picture of how money was being spent and which policies actually worked. The report concluded that this disjointed approach had failed to improve outcomes for the victims.
Sadly, it appears that the present Labour government has done little to improve the situation. The campaign group The Centre for Women’s Justice has said that if they have a realistic plan, it has been a slow start and their messaging is poor.
One is forced to conclude that little or nothing has, or is being done, to seriously address this problem because it is deemed to be of little importance when compared with the bigger problems identified as facing the government.
It is a serious problem which clearly needs to be addressed with some priority and on present evidence this government has, like its predecessors, neither the will, nor the determination to do that.
John Cooper
Improve care for older people
The debate surrounding assisted dying due to the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill has inadvertently distorted public understanding of how most people die.
Death is inevitable, and for most people, it occurs in old age, at the end of a natural lifespan.
Each year, around 670,000 people die in the UK, nearly two-thirds of whom are aged over 75 and most have multiple long-term conditions and/or frailty, rather than a single condition.
The majority of people who die do not have contact with specialist palliative care services, being cared for instead by the generalist health and social care workforce and by specialists in older people’s care. A first step to improving end-of-life care for all would be to strengthen the existing workforce caring for older people.
The forthcoming 10 Year NHS plan and spending review provide an opportunity to address this. Our health and care system needs to support people with good care right to the end of life.
Professor Jugdeep Dhesi, British Geriatrics Society
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