Certain amount of selective amnesia concerning early Thatcher years

RE: THE early Thatcher years and selected amnesia by Tim Mickleburgh, when Margaret Thatcher won the 1979 General Election, the country was in turmoil.

Denis Healey, the Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer, the year before, had been called back at Heathrow Airport by the IMF because of the dire state of the country's finances.

Rampant trade union actions left a position in Liverpool where the dead couldn't be buried. Strikes around the country were commonplace.

In 1983, Arthur Scargill, the coal miners' president, was again confronting the elected Conservative government.

Ten years earlier he and other trade union leaders had led to the eventual downfall of Edward Heath, the Tory prime minister, at the 1974 General Election.

The order of the day being power cuts and the three-day working week.

Geoffrey Rhodes, Yarborough Road, Grimsby.

Divisive policies

IT IS interesting to compare current political commentator's views on events we have experienced in the past, just as your recent correspondent suggests.

Unfortunately, memory can be selective in supporting our own prejudice.

To attribute Ms Thatcher's 1983 landslide victory to a few discontented Labour MPs and the Falklands war, as he suggests, is selective.

Perhaps her success also took advantage of the near meltdown of the Labour party in attempts to accommodate its own left wing and placate the unions.

The record number of new house owners and the demise of communism at home and abroad may also have helped win elections.

Mrs Thatcher's policies were divisive – if you believed state ownership was a panacea for our national problems.

To win three consecutive elections suggest otherwise. Her courage, integrity, and national pride, seem in rather short supply in politics at the moment. Perhaps this is just my selective memory at work.

Alec Brown, Station Road, Grasby, Barnetby.

Turbines threat

I SEE Graham Stuart feels the MOD should put us all at increased risk while allowing Yorkshire's most precious economic asset – its landscape – to be destroyed.

Why do small businesses planning turbine development need subsidies when his own Environment Minister is saying they should stand on their own two feet, and how much damage is being done to our treasured landscapes?

How many thousands of tourism jobs are going to be destroyed in Yorkshire at a time when we have just been voted Best Tourism Destination In Britain.

Just when David Hockney and "Welcome to Yorkshire" is making that success worldwide, making people marvel at the very landscapes that is being threatened with industrialisation.

Has Mr Stuart got a vested interest in them? And why should he be speaking out on encouraging turbine proliferation, at a time when the MOD have stated this is causing them problems and that they are alarmed at the reality of turbine-infested hills not only desecrating our Yorkshire landscape but also putting our national security at risk?

And why only for a chosen few and those with financial interests resulting in that Yorkshire landscape desecration?

These are not just a couple of small turbines, Mr Stuart – you are talking about hundreds in the pipeline and even more with your attempted intervention. Monstrosities that are described by all those with hands in the till as "small" turbines, which in reality are now being submitted as farm turbines up to 86m tall – that's 280ft high to most people.

Is this like your version of Jerusalem "On England's Green & Turbined Land"?

Godfrey Bloom, UKIP MEP for Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire, member of EU Parliamentary Environment Committee.

Support talent

HAVING seen Fusion Youth Theatre's show Deeds Not Words at Ormiston Maritime Academy, I had to write in.

This cast performed a fabulous piece of theatre about the Suffragette movement.

People should always go along to these productions and support local talent.

Helen Jagger, address supplied.

Power of shares

WHAT happens if more than 50 per cent of company employees forego their employee rights, as promised by George Osborne, take the share option, sack the owner and either; mutualise, co-operativise or seek nationalisation of the company?

Or will the Chancellor of the Exchequer make sure these company shares have no real voting power, thereby disengaging the shareholders from the company operations?

Duncan Anderson, Mill Lane, East Halton.

It's alarming!

IN A local superstore, I was waiting to pay for my purchases at the checkout when I noticed a large sign on an emergency exit.

"This door is alarmed". Oh yeah? Not half as alarmed as I was when the dratted thing went off just as I was walking past it. Wah! Typical.

Neil Jones, College Street, Cleethorpes.