What is St Benedict’s School in Whitehaven doing to rectify the problem of having no school transport from the Copeland housing estates to the school?

Under the government’s newly-revised rules, children travelling to school should do so while trying to stay in their own social bubble. Yet this is wholly impossible, due to the fact that they are having to travel from their estates into Whitehaven and then on to school, mixing with many different individuals from outside of their social bubble thus increasing the likelihood of becoming infected with Covid-19 – and as a consequence passing it onto siblings, parents and grandparents.

Keeping the R number (the infection rate) down decreases the chance of this virus spreading, thus if no school transport is available there is a high propensity to increase the (R number). It then must follow that these students who have to take this route to school be exempt from returning to school until this derogation of duty of care be rectified.

JOHN JOSEPH CUNNINGHAM

By email

In black and white

Let’s not worry about austerity or about the cost of a pandemic. Years ago the Bank of England published a manual on how the Bank routinely creates money from nothing. Voters mainly need to concern themselves about their pay-off for colluding in the selection of a government, not the rights or wrongs or morals of that government.

Since the decline of Caribbean sugar profits 200 years ago meant plantation owners could no longer afford to pay for their MPs from rotten boroughs, British taxpayers have funded the largest slavery-related reparations ever paid out.

Under the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act, the government borrowed and gave away 40 per cent of its annual budget – equivalent to a £300 billion handout today. The debt was paid off in 2015.

This compensation went to the British slave owners for their loss of human property, not to those who laboured and died in captivity under slavery, nor to their descendants. It was all given to British businessmen and aristocrats, as restitution for the loss of their human ‘assets’.

An illustration indeed of how black workers’ lives weigh against white aristocratic rights, and how the moral imperative of government works in reality.

DUGALD LAMB

Moor Row

Cuckoo

I WRITE in connection with the article regarding Copeland’s mayor Mike Starkie (The Whitehaven News, July 22). It is my opinion that there should be a by-election as he has now changed his colours.

If the people of Copeland had wanted a Tory mayor, they would have voted for the Tory candidate at the time of the election.

It is also my opinion that he has overstepped the mark by sacking long-standing Labour councillors in an attempt to dodge criticism. I am of the opinion he is now behaving like a cuckoo throwing out the opposition from the nest and in the process showing his true colours.

SIMEON SCOTT

Egremont

Time is not on our side

What if we got a second coronavirus spike here in the UK? Can you imagine it hitting Cumbria, what it would do to the tourist industry, jobs, and the very future of Cumbria – how would they all cope?

With travel restrictions climbing for people flying in from certain countries it’s time for the Government to take action and appoint a minister specially for the coronavirus. Should we again leave it too late what would it do for the country?

We need to be prepared for the worst, on what I would call a war footing so that we are in control, not the virus.

I hope the Government is looking at what is going on in Spain and is prepared for the worst. We have winter coming up and not very far away the flu season – and what then? We can’t keep shutting down businesses thus putting people out of work.

We need a fast and honest approach to what is now a major crisis growing daily around the world and we are not alone. Politicians, forget your own holidays and start from tomorrow putting this country together again and run it as it should be by putting us first.

Look after the UK, look after the jobs, look after the people – then we can state we can deal with a second strike and be fully able, because as it is time is not on our side!

HERBERT CROSSMAN

By email

Nuclear waste 'a danger into eternity'

TWO headlines in The Whitehaven News (July 22) made for a double take. “Not in the Lake District says council” of an underground high-level nuclear waste dump and “Community’s fury at litter in heritage spot” of littering at Egremont Castle are a case in point.

The first was about Copeland joining the “process” for delivery of the most toxic littering humans have devised – that of nuclear waste. The borough council’s “red line” is arbitrarily drawn and could easily be tweaked to include Ennerdale in the ‘excluded’ Lake District.

Egremont is outside of the Lake District and one of the areas specifically mentioned by Radioactive Waste Management as being of “suitable” geology. So Copeland Council by “joining the process” has effectively thrown Egremont to the nuclear wolves. Government have made sure there is no longer a right of veto as there was in 2013 when the last “steps towards geological disposal” were stopped by Cumbria County Council.

The only criterion now is a “test of public support” – what that test would be is anyone’s guess. It could be the mayor saying he has “100 per cent unequivocal support” and that people outside of Copeland should “butt out” as he has said repeatedly about the coal mine.

The coal mine and the GDF are linked because by embedding West Cumbria Mining into Cumbria the means by which to deliver a GDF is also embedded. Nowhere else in the UK has deep mining infrastructure.

Our objections to the coal mine are linked to the proximity to the world’s biggest concentration of radioactivity at Sellafield. Induced seismicity and subsidence of the Irish Sea bed would have catastrophic radiological consequences. So it is shocking that the chief executive of West Cumbria Mining has been appointed to the government Committee on Radioactive Waste Management – the quango tasked with delivery of a GDF.

Copeland should do the right thing and withdraw from “discussions” with Radioactive Waste Management on delivery of a GDF and when the coal mine plan comes before Cumbria County Council on August 20 Copeland councillors on that committee should remember that the CEO of West Cumbria Mining is tasked with delivery of a GDF and that Egremont and the Irish Sea (and Ennerdale) are in the frame for the worst kind of littering that humanity has devised – that of dumping into complex and faulted geology nuclear wastes that will remain dangerous into eternity.

Nuclear Litter Louts!

MARIANNE BIRKBY

Radiation Free Lakeland, Milnthorpe