Scrapping the fireworks was a difficult, but brave decision (From Haringey Independent)

Scrapping the fireworks was a difficult, but brave decision

12:00pm Monday 5th July 2010 in Readers' Letters

So Lynne Featherstone thinks the Ally Pally Trustees are "letting people down" by cancelling their financial support for the annual fireworks display, Haringey Independent, 1 July 2010)?

Nonsense. The board has made clear they are pursuing other funding, and in the current financial crisis they have made a difficult but brave decision, sadly probably all too necessary. The person in Haringey who has really let people down is David Cameron's woman in Haringey, Lynne Featherstone herself.

How many of the parents who voted for Lynne thought they were voting for her Government to raise VAT to 20 per cent, impose a three year freeze in child benefit, and scrap funding for new school buildings?

How many of the tenants who put a cross by Lynne's name thought they were voting for her Government to abandon Labour's plans for a national register of landlords to crack down on shoddy housing?

How many of the families in overcrowded flats who supported Lynne thought they were voting for her government to cap housing benefit and force them out on to the streets?

How many of the people who backed Lynne are genuinely proud that one of her Government's first priorities, just a fortnight into power, was to slash the national budget for housing vulnerable gypsy and traveller families by two-thirds?

I have happy memories of the Ally Pally fireworks display from my childhood in Haringey in the 1980s, itself a time of cuts and unemployment at the hands of a callous and uncaring Tory Government. The need to stop funding the fireworks is another sign that the savage, reckless, economically-unnecessary and politically-motivated cuts that David Cameron and Lynne Featherstone have in mind for our services, our borough, and our communities will make the 1980s look like a golden age by comparison.

Tim Waters, Cunningham Road, South Tottenham