National events impact us too

I agree with one of your recent contributors to the Letters Page that the published letters should mainly focus on local issues. Where perhaps I differ is when there are national events that clearly have significant impact on families, neighbourhoods and towns across Cheshire. Now, there is a wide variety of view about how important the Chancellor’s Budget Statement last week will actually turn out to be; time will tell. However, what we can, certainly, look at is how the most pressing day-to-day problems, which might well affect local people, are impacted. So, for example, given the demography of this area, it is of some concern that pensioners appear, according to many analysts, to be a key group that is going to be worse off. Given the appalling state of many of our public services and facilities in Cheshire, one can only speculate as to why there are going to be, once again, real-term cuts to local authority budgets. Furthermore, there seems to have been no serious, new investment in everyone’s top priority: the NHS. Indeed, in real-terms, it looks as if the NHS will, once again, be losing money, with the emphasis being entirely on IT and “efficiency” – two ideas that are not wrong in themselves, but have been shown not to make much of a dent in the historically-high waiting lists, or the dire staffing problems. I meet a lot of people who seem at a level of despair about how things are: we need to give them hope!

Published today in the Knutsford Guardian