London is not a paranoid fortress
LAST week the Met Police announced that they are deploying 600 additional armed officers in London, despite the fact that ‘there is currently no intelligence to suggest that there is an imminent threat to London and the United Kingdom’.
I am really unhappy about any increase in armed police. Rather than providing reassurance, it makes me feel very unsafe. As far as I know, there is no evidence that guns can combat or prevent terrorist attacks.
How would more armed police have helped stop 9.11, the London bombings, the massacres in Paris, Nice, etc?
I do not want the UK becoming more like the USA, with police likely to kill innocent people by over-reacting to perceived threats. Stockwell was one too many. The London I know and love has never been a paranoid fortress, and I am seriously worried by any moves in that direction.
Sheila Taylor, Bermondsey
Do the right thing for disabled residents
Many thanks Southwark News for taking up this story of a local business woman who happens to be disabled but Southwark are frustrating her from running her business [Disabled business woman refused parking bay outside shop – as there’s not enough demand, News, August 11].
We know unemployment is at a significantly higher rate for disabled residents than the fully able.
Something like two-thirds of disabled people are unemployed! That’s terrible for the individuals concerned not earning a living and for society unable to tax income not earned.
So for Southwark Council to give no support and refuse the creation of disabled parking for employees and business owners where they work where the business isn’t big enough to have off street parking is sheer madness.
Come on Southwark you know you need to change your policies and do the right thing for such disabled residents.
When will you put in a disabled parking bay without a 4 hour limit for Hulys Arif?
James Barber, Liberal Democrat councillor for East Dulwich ward
Memories of a retired HGV driver
I purchased a copy of your newspaper from a shop in Borough High Street from a meeting late at night. Two things on page 22 – memory jerkers – caught my eye. Railway arches.
In the mid sixties the wine merchants at South Moulton Street, W1, outgrew its premises, and we decamped to Arch 212 Carlisle Lane, SE1.
I left five years later to join John Barkers in Kensington High Street as a cellarman. What memories.
The other thing was the lorry. A Ford D if I’m not mistaken. I’d just come back from abroad (Europe)?in 1971 looking for a job driving. This firm in Hounslow had a Ford D lorry, but it needed a lot of attention. I christened it Frankenstein, beacuse all the bits came off other lorries (bodywork, tires, etc).
I drove it for a year until that fateful day on the road to Hull, late in the evening, bang went the engine. It was towed to the main Ford deaklers fully loaded still.
They looked at it and said ‘you need a new engine, come back tomorrow and I’ll speak to your boss’.
To cut a long story short, I stayed at the local seamans’ mission hostel for two days. Finally, on the third day a phonecall from my boss. Get a train back, leave it there and I’ll arrange somethingh for the load, etc. So that’s how I left it.
What memories of Hull.
John Steward, retired HGV driver, Twickenham