Mission impossible (From The Northern Echo)

Mission impossible

2:20pm Friday 10th February 2012 in Letters

STEPHANIE FINNEGAN provides us with a graphic account of how ineffective the measures of the Government is making through the work programme to get people into work and off benefits (HAS, Feb 9).

The Government loudly proclaims that it is doing something about the problem, but fails to realise that we need full employment and parts of the North-East are in an unenviable position, because of the de-industrialisation brought about at the time of Margaret Thatcher, from which they have never recovered.

Political correspondent Rob Merrick, in the same edition, points out that local councils are going to have to charge council tax to sections of the community who have not had to pay it because of their financial plight.

Representative democracy does not act in a way to protect the most deprived because these people rarely exercise their votes We need the Stephanie Finnegans of the world to speak up for those who suffer injustice.

To readers like me, it is salutary to learn that conditions that were characteristic of the 19th Century, judging from my reading from that period, have near equivalents today Geoffrey Bulmer, Billingham.