Darlington FC

I HAVE donated to the Save Quakers fund but I think they would be better off returning to Feethams and spending a fraction of the money they are spending at the Reynolds Arena.

Why? If they cannot find any means of getting any revenue into the club, I cannot see football alone keeping them solvent.

If our council puts restrictions on Mr Reynolds, I cannot see them lifting them unless they want a mutiny of local residents.

Just think very hard before you start putting money into a bottomless bucket. - F Wealands, Darlington.

THE administrators should reveal what Darlington Football Club's finances for this season exactly were.

The club, I understood, has the financial benefit of car parking charges, which it never had the benefit of previously at Feethams.

The fans are not the lowest in Division Three and they are paying £14 per adult as opposed to £9 and £10 last season.

How can the club be in debt considering it has been unable to sign players because clubs from the Conference and clubs such as Macclesfield and Rochdale can pay better, yet usually get smaller crowds. - Brian Foster, Darlington.

RE-CYCLING

ASSUMING that Darlington Council gets paid for our recycled rubbish, it should adopt the slogan 'Recycling helps to keep your council tax down' then maybe more people would be encouraged to join the scheme. - Valerie Calvert, Darlington.

ROAD CONDITIONS

WITHOUT sounding like Victor Meldrew intentionally, I don't believe that, with all the £60s collected from motorists by the police for speeding fines, the first fall of snow in the winter brought chaos to our roads.

It took me two-and-a-half hours on Thursday to travel from Bishop Auckland to Crook, a journey of about nine miles and approximately 20 minutes normally.

Surely the revenue collected by this detested scheme should be given to the local council towards gritting and keeping roads open, because this is a time of year when accidents happen that cannot be avoided, due to ice and not speeding. - A McKimm, Crook.

ON Thursday most of County Durham was at a total standstill from 4.30pm thanks to Durham County Council not getting snowploughs and gritters out in time.

It was taking traffic two hours to travel two-and-a-half miles to get from Consett to Castleside, then another two hours to try to get to Tow Law, but only getting two miles up the A68 and having to turn around as the road was at a standstill again.

The council said it was ready for any kind of weather we got this winter, and this is what happens when we get snow.

It took people almost six hours to get from Consett to Eastgate in Weardale. Is this what the council thinks is good service for the council tax payers?

At 8.30pm two tractors with blades on and one council gritter with a blade came through Castleside in a space of five minutes of each other.

The county council spent a lot of money on electronic gadgets throughout the county to tell what the weather was doing, but unfortunately they don't say if it is snowing or raining.

It's about time we went back to the old way of having men out on the job with more say instead of computers trying to run the job.

I am sure the council could do a better job than it is doing when it comes to winter maintenance.

It sends gritters out early when it is raining or on bone dry roads but not when it is snowing. - J Henderson, Consett.

FREE SPEECH

ONE of the basic principles of democracy is the freedom of speech and opinion.

Hugh Pender obviously asserts that right for himself but appears to deny it for others.

His response (HAS, Jan 3) to my letter (HAS, Dec 20) is to accuse me of having a very low opinion of human nature and being vitriolic in my opinion of others.

In my 70 years plus of being an everyday Northern Echo reader we rarely, if ever, see a more vicious and cruel example of character assassination as that shown in his castigation of Robert Kilroy-Silk and those who support him (HAS, Jan 16). - AW Dunn, Spennymoor.

PETER MULLEN

I, FOR one, do bleed for the children who witnessed the pheasants being blasted out of the sky. I wouldn't like to see it and would be incensed if any of my children had.

Peter Mullen (Echo, Jan 20) generalises by calling modern kids wimpish and accuses them of shedding uneducated tears. I brought up my children - all now well over 30, with kids of their own - to be respectful of animals and creatures, from bugs to the big stuff. I am sure the majority of parents do.

Food for the table is a necessity and not killed for sport, which he describes as a wholesome activity.

Football? Tennis? Swimming? Ripping living creatures apart or blasting them to pieces?

I rest my case. Get rid of Peter Mullen. He hurts my feelings. - M Ward, Darlington.

INWARD INVESTMENT

AFTER reading Peter Troy's letter (HAS, Jan 20) I would agree with him 100 per cent.

I am a retired businesman and I tried for many years to show that small business is the life blood of this country.

When Fujitsu closed, it employed around 600 people, and had received massive amounts of money to locate at Newton Aycliffe.

If this money had been given to 60 small business employing an average of ten staff, the same amount of employment would be there. The probability is that 50 of these businesses would then fail, but the remainder could prosper.

As it is, all the eggs are in one basket. The current system makes it extremely difficult during the first years of a business.

I believe that income tax should only be paid on the profits which are taken out of the company. We spent some of the profits moving to a leased factory, however we then had to pay tax on them.

I think One NorthEast should be scrapped. It seems accountable to no one. - George Blood, Bishop Auckland.