Letters

YOUR drawing of the replica Locomotion No 1 lacks a vital detail: huge clouds of dense, acrid, sulphuric-laden smoke which poured from its chimney stack.

As the writer responsible for the play No 1 Giant Leap for Mankind, I have linked Locomotion No 1 to modern travel, giving a glimpse of how time travellers from a future where oxygen is at a premium return to 1825 to try to change George Stephenson's mind from the choice of coal to power his steam engine tp pedal power supplied by the audience!

The S&D paved the way for the mechanised, industrial and technological world in which we now live and though technology is not to be feared, its abuse is. We have the benefit of hindsight that George Stephenson could never have known about. Our roads are gridlocked, skies crisscrossed by trails of burnt aviation fuel. Ice caps are melting, sea levels rising, coastlines disappearing, yet how many of us still toddle off down to the shops in our cars, oblivious to our small but destructive role in the bigger picture?

We are foolish if we cannot see the environmental changes between 1825 and 2000 and the links between coal and oil, the steam engine and the motor car. It is a depressing picture to paint on such an auspicious occasion but it is only by giving people truths and facts that we stand any chance of making it to the next millenia. And it is not our future - it is our children's.

Let us be honest and proud of our railway heritage but admit we have serious lessons to learn and strategies to apply to save ourselves from our obsession with fossil-based fuels. - Tony Stowers, Kirk Merrington, Co Durham.

ASYLUM SEEKERS

I THINK it's John Seacroft (HAS, July 22) who needs to open his eyes regarding the asylum seekers. He states 'many of the refugees have been through the type of experiences that the vast majority of British people cannot possibly imagine'.

Really? Where's his proof. The truth is that 99 per cent of asylum seekers in this country are economic refugees. If they had been in the peril he states they would not travel across continents and oceans, through country after country, to get to Britain. Surely they would stay in the first safe haven they reached. They come so far because we're a soft touch.

He thinks in his naivety that we should feel sorry for these people. I'll save my sympathy for the parents of the 16-year-old girl raped by asylum seekers in Sunderland recently and for the parents of 15-year-old Hailey Brannon from Gateshead, who has disappeared with 30-year-old asylum seeker Oaskan Omanov, who admits in a letter to them he wants to get Hailey pregnant so that he can stay in this country. I feel really sorry for that bloke.

Of course Blair, cunning political operator that he is, knows he's on the ropes on this one so he does what he always does when he sees a problem he hasn't got the guts to face, he throws money at it. In this case another £600m of our money to clear up the backlog. New Labour speak for 'cover up and hide it' until after the General Election. - AE Pearce, address supplied.

I HAVE been totally disgusted and dismayed by the whipping up of hatred against asylum seekers.

Shamefully, the response of New Labour is to bow down to the right-wing press.

The right wing hope the deep anger that people feel, especially in run-down areas, with low pay, bad housing and cuts in council services, can be diverted into hatred of refugees.

The ploy of the Tories is to try and make people forget it was actually 18 years of Tory government and their attacks on working people that destroyed services, forced millions on the dole and ensured the rich got richer.

New Labour, instead of exposing the Tories, has decided it can make capital out of playing the race card over refugees. Its aim is to divide and rule.

If people are busy targeting those at the bottom of society then those at the top can continued to rob us all. - Paul Lockey, Durham Socialist Alliance.

HUNTING

THE hunting debate has a side which I have not seen advanced and is therefore not being heard.

What about those of us who do not support hunting, but are against a legal ban? Those who understand the meaning of democracy to be government resulting in a society ignoring hereditary class distinctions and tolerating minority views.

I understand that many members of society in this country find hunting with hounds to be abhorrent, but I am at a loss to understand how they can justify making it a criminal offence. I would appreciate an unemotive and objective response to the following three questions from representatives of the other sides of the argument.

Is hunting anti-social and to be viewed, for example, on the same basis as murder, robbery, speeding, riding bicycles on pavements and under-age drinking? Is society endangered by the activities of this minority; these men, women and children mounted on horses following hounds, who hunt? What benefits would be gained by society if a law, forbidding hunting with dogs, but not forbidding hunting with guns and snares, were to be passed? - Keith Carley, Thirsk.

SMOKING

ONE can only wonder where your correspondent Bethany Megan Robinson has been for many years.

In her letter protesting against smoking restrictions (HAS, Aug 1), she refers to 'the so-called dangers of smoking'. Even the tobacco industry admits the dangers of smoking after denying or suppressing the evidence for many years (one in three smokers suffering premature death). She then suggests that smokers may be compelled go without food in order to buy cigarettes, and that this is why so many die so young and painfully.

This must be their choice, since the industry and Forest is always claiming that smoking is not addictive and thus smokers smoke because they wish to. - Eric Gendle, Nunthorpe, Middlesbrough.