November 2: Stop talking down the Market Square
With letter after letter, week after week, Eamonn Fitzpatrick talks down our Market Square. I wonder if he actually wants anyone to shop there.
Fitzy says he wants to "save the market". Well that's exactly what Lib Dems in the Guildhall are doing. Not talking about it, getting on anddoing it.
Saving the market means more markets, different stalls and a new lease of life for the country's largest market square . . . just like theItalian Market, set for November 6-7, or the German Market for four weeks leading up to Christmas.
Then there are the specialist arts markets, introduced this year and returning next year, bringing the squareinto use on Sundays.
New traders attract new customers and bring a new lease of life to our Market Square.
This week alone, five new permanent traders are taking up stalls on the market, with some of them taking up the free business link training course to help them get going. Meanwhile, catering stalls are being revamped to provide shoppers with better places to meet and eat.
Next year, the new water feature will be in place. And as the Chron reported (October 29), brand-new energy efficient lighting is planned to stop our square staying a night-time black-hole.
All in, the moves amount to making our square an attractive place for people to enjoy, day and night, seven days a week.
Come on Fitzy, get on board. Stop talking down the market and help us put the pride back into the town centre.
Councillor Richard Church,
Liberal Democrat, Kingsthorpe, and cabinet member for planning and regeneration, Northampton Borough Council.
Home-grown products needed
Does anyone else see the irony of this council making a pig's ear of our market to such an extent that a number of stallholders have left, reducing our freedom of choice, and then inviting Italians and Germans to sell their wares at grossly inflated prices?
I would rather have a full market selling home-grown products and I am sure I am not alone.
In addition, we now have the prospect of lighting up this folly to advertise its demise. How ludicrous is that and what a total waste of money.
There must be better ways of spending money that will benefit the local population who will gain absolutely nothing from an illuminated square which most people never see at night as they dare not venture into town after dark.
E Barnes,
Leicester Street, Northampton.
Waste of money
Well, we have heard it all now. What a load of rubbish wasting money on lighting for the Market Square.
I thought we were urging people to cut down on carbon emmision and save energy.
The council not long ago was complaining of us pensioners using too much of their alloted money for our bus passes.
They also want to look around the town first and get some of these empty shops open. It really looks an eyesore. That's where they want to spend the money.
P Mcmahon,
Carlyle Avenue, Duston, Northampton.
Where to stick it
Please tell me that Councillor Brendan Glynane was not seriously asking Northampton residents and traders to suggest somewhere to put the third Christmas tree cone!
Kathryn Ozlati,
St Giles Street, Northampton.
Rants only recruit for the BNP
DR Feldman’s letter concerning the BNP and John Dickie’s rant calling BNP supporters “a tiny majority of hard done by lumpen whiners” have one thing in common. They act as a recruiting sergeant for BNP.
The doctor should tell the British glorious dead of two world wars the country they fought for was a myth and that believing you are British is a link to “Nazism”. Try telling the Queen Great Britain is a myth. As for the BNP being the cause of rivers of blood, this is just silly.
Continued uncontrolled immigration of peoples who hate the way we live and the democracy we enjoy could well cause such rivers, as Enoch Powell predicted and called madness so many years ago.
I’m not aware of the BNP carrying out acts of terror on a daily basis. It wasn’t the BNP who bombed London and attacked airports. It was home-grown Islamic terrorists.
As for Dickie, I think it must be fear of the BNP success that makes him dismiss and insult the million people that voted for the BNP in the European Election or the 25 per cent of British people who in a recent survey said that they would vote for the BNP.
It must be very painful that most, like him, are Old Labour supporters.
I have never voted BNP but like many, if the main political parties don’t get a strong grip on immigration for political gain and stop insulting the British race, I may well!
John Wright,
Port Road, Duston, Northampton.
Forked tongues like Labour spin
DR Matthew Feldman seems convinced that the BNP’s attempts to deceive and cynically manipulate voters with “forked-tongue rhetoric” marks it out as qualitatively different from the other parties (Viewpoint, October 28).
In fact, the new-look BNP that has emerged from the “modernisation” undertaken by Nick Griffin bears uncanny resemblances to the metamorphosis from Old to New Labour under Tony Blair!
For the “forked-tongue rhetoric” of the BNP, read New Labour “spin”. In the matter of deception and cynical manipulation of voters, New Labour will be a hard act for the BNP to follow. They deceived us about everything from an EU referendum and tuition fees to WMD and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Again, for the “mythic nationalism”, Dr Feldman describes as the thread running through the Nazis to the BNP. We might note a similar thread running through New Labour’s commitment to the “mythic nationalists” of the Zionist state of Israel and their genocidal policies against the Palestinians.
This thread ran likewise through to the unequivocal views Griffin expressed on Question Time on both the Holocaust and Israel’s right to “defend” itself.
Griffin, like many Britons, still has problems with multiculturalism, but by relinquishing his pariah status as a Holocaust “denier” and roundly defending Israel, Griffin may now be well on the way to ingratiating himself with the politically correct establishment represented by all the other parties, not to mention the BBC itself.
All of which probably explains why the BBC agreed to give him a platform in the first place.
Guy Nicholls,
Elmhurst Court, Spinney Hill, Northampton.
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