Letters to the Editor - October 10th

Oct 10 2007 Liverpool Daily Post

We need time to get this right

I REFER to your article regarding the £400m shake-up that will affect every secondary school in our city. I am conscious that such a shake- up is Government led, and am concerned that three of the schools mentioned in the report are in my ward.

Given the falling numbers of pupils throughout the city, I’m aware that in all probability there will have to be significant change. However, it must be done with both sensitivity and the best interests of our children in mind. Parents and teachers, as well as local politicians and Members of Parliament, must all be given every opportunity and assistance to come up with alternatives and try to make viable each school under threat.

While I welcome the Building Schools for the Future Programme, I’m somewhat concerned that the Government-led agenda and policy on this issue includes a closure programme, not only in this city, but across the nation as a whole.

I’m encouraged by the concerns raised by the city’s education leader Cllr Paul Clein in relation to the Croxteth area. Having recently visited schools in my area and witnessed the tremendous work which is being done, I’m pleased to see that council officers have met with Lord Adonis and have managed to persuade him that recent tragic events, which have been extremely unsettling for my community, both demand and require further consideration of Croxteth’s particular situation.

The Government, along with the local education system should proceed with caution in Croxteth. The last thing the area needs, given the current climate, is further problems. I appeal that consideration and sensitivity be granted, and that our area be given the time and space to produce an alternative way forward.

Our children, the results they have achieved in the recent past and our community as a whole, deserve time to address these very real concerns.

Cllr Phil Moffatt, Croxteth Ward

Music for all

INCOMPARABLE is the word that best sums up the Berliner Philharmoniker. Bringing it, and Liverpool-born conductor Sir Simon Rattle, to our Philharmonic Hall is a coup for the Liverpool Culture Company.

When von Karajan’s BPO visited New York in 1982, posters advertising the event had the “Sold out“ stickers already pasted on. If you are privileged enough to attend, you share the same experience of most heads of state since its inception 125 years ago.

The world’s greatest conductors have coveted its baton. Their names are as synonymous with achievement as the great composers whose music they perform. Its visit to Liverpool is comparable to the visit by the legendary Wilhelm Furtwangler before the war.

It has performed at the world’s most illustrious venues, including La Scala, the Vienna Philharmonic and the Accademia Santa Cecilia, in Rome.

All very impressive, but it is timely to remember that classical music is not for the well-heeled few. It is the inspiration of the world’s greatest composers whose poverty in life made most of us rich by comparison.

Brahms we might well identify with. The composer said to be Beethoven’s comparable once played the piano for a living in Hamburg’s dockside taverns. They’re all coming back home. This truly is the people’s culture.

Michael McLaughlin, Liverpool 8

We should all care

WORLD Mental Health Day today may be just one date on the calendar, but its significance is important to the whole of our community. Mental health is relevant to everyone, and mental distress can affect physical as well as emotional well-being.

Research shows that one in four of the population will suffer some form of mental health problem during their lifetime.

Mental illness attacks the whole person. For us all to achieve fulfilment, we need to obtain a good balance between physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual dimensions. One strand nourishes the others.

Mersey Care NHS Trust, which serves Liverpool, Sefton and Kirkby, treated 16,318 people in 2006 to 2007.

Those who work in mental health also know there is no such thing as a quick fix and many people have on-going mental health issues.

An important dimension to mental health has to be the stigma associated with it – which is why I applaud Everton Football Club for engaging people with mental health needs into the mainstream through their coaching and community disability programmes, and Barnardo’s for helping to tackle the stigma for children in families affected by mental ill-health.

This year, the World Mental Health Day theme is mental health in a changing world: the impact of culture and diversity, highlighting the need for services that incorporate different cultural backgrounds and beliefs, deal with language barriers, and create culturally sensitive forms of dialogue. In a city as culturally diverse as ours, that should be our trademark.

Steve Hawkins,Chair, Mersey Care NHS Trust

It’s history

IN THE history of the world, people have done dreadful things to other people, usually the strong inflicting hurt and death on the weak – Man’s inhumanity to Man.

The slave trade, which operated in the 17th and 18th centuries and resulted in millions of Africans being taken to the West Indies and the Americas, is such an example.

Marine cities such as Liverpool and Bristol prospered from it. That is true.

The trouble with the atrocities of history is that they happened and there is nothing you can do about it now.

Black people are understandably very sensitive to the slave trade, but history also tells us that some black people have carried out dreadful attacks on other black people. It is not racist to point this out, it is simply true.

In ancient history, the Romans wiped out the magnificent city of Carthage, slaughtering or enslaving its entire population, estimated at 800,000. By any standards it was a crime against humanity, but it belongs to history.

The exploration and settlement of the New World resulted in millions of its native population dying through war, disease or famine. History. Closer to home, the English and the Scots have inflicted appalling atrocities against each other. History.

But people go on and on about the slave trade. Without wishing to be unkind or to diminish the suffering of others, is it not time that it, too, became history?

S Evans, Birkenhead

Not worth it

CAN anybody tell me why we still have to pay a licence fee to the BBC when all it does is trot out tired old shows with the same dreary formats?

Reliance on reality TV to fill the schedules is one thing, but having had one good run on a fairly threadbare idea, endlessly repeating it, is just laziness.

The Saturday night schedule is the worst offender. Not only have we got what feels like the zillionth series of Strictly Come Dancing, and now apparently the Beeb is plotting yet another “find a theatre star” show, hard on the heels of Grease and The Sound of Music. The new one is Saturday Night Fever – just cheap publicity for impresarios like Andrew Lloyd Webber, as far as I can see.

While the likes of The Blue Planet are fantastic, the good stuff comes up with such rarity that the licence fee feels increasingly anachronistic.

G Piper, Mossley Hill

Ban competitions

AFTER all these scandals and embarrassing apologies from everyone from GMTV to Blue Peter, is it not time for Ofcom to turn around and put a blanket ban on all television stations running phone-in competitions?

They are unnecessary, they ruin programmes, and they encourage people to gamble. Because, at the end of the day, that is what you are doing when you enter these competitions. If these phone-ins were dropped, then maybe the programme-makers would have to concentrate a bit harder on making decent shows that would win ratings and boost advertising revenue, instead of just relying on the money from these competitions to boost their coffers.

D Simpson, Runcorn

NHS scandal

YOUR front page yesterday made for depressing reading “What price life?”. How on Earth has the health service which used to be the envy of the world ended up watching people die needlessly because the money just is not there to save their lives?

We are supposed to have a free NHS, yet more and more people are having to use their own earnings – not for needless operations but for lifesaving treatments.

I realise that there is not an endless pot of money to be spent on medications, but surely no more people should have to watch their loved ones die in pain when the medicine is there to keep them alive.

L Millett, Wigan

Hoping for success

SO NOW Liverpool has its own St Jamie, in the shape of Jamie Carragher, who launched his Café Sport eaterie this week promising to try to help with the eating habits of young people. I absolutely commend his actions and, as a sporting hero, I am sure that many youngsters will look up to him. For that reason, I do hope he has more success than that other famous Jamie – whose efforts appear to be falling on deaf ears.

S Dawson, Wallasey

Whatever next?

WANTED, one landing stage that can float. What next? I can’t wait for the next sorry tale. My money is on it being “Wrong tarmac used in city centre – floor sinks, people trapped up to their knees. City centre chaos and Church Street closed until further notice”.

I can just see this headline coming through the mist.

George Gibbons, Bootle

Terminal illness

SO, YET more problems with the cruise liner terminal. Considering that we have been in the maritime game for centuries, should we not have been able to at least get this one right first time?

H Moore, Crosby