Letters to the editor
Has anybody looked at the plans for the new Link Road in detail?
After a recent peruse online, one thing really stood out to me… the number of bloody roundabouts!
In total there will be seven roundabouts along just a few miles of road between the A46 and the A1.
I understand that they will be used access to different villages and neighbourhoods south of Newark, but is it just me or does this seem a bit excessive?
I thought the whole point of this new road was to reduce traffic around Newark?
But surely, if traffic is having to slow down and stop every few hundred metres to access a roundabout, then cars will continue to back up and it won’t solve anything.
We’ve all seen how traffic jams start. One person breaks, then the person behind them, and the person behind them, starting a chain reaction and before long you have people sat waiting for no good reason.
Then when it comes to safety, we will see huge lorries using the road as a cut through to avoid using the bypass.
Lorries take a long time to speed up and slow down, and will be tackling relatively small roundabouts. How long before one flips over or rams into the back of someone?
I’ve not heard anybody talk about this aspect of the project yet and I just feel like it could have been thought out a little better.
Maybe I’m wrong, but I’m happy to listen to other people’s thoughts and be corrected if I’m wrong.
— G. Rumble, Newark
Like many of my and the post-war generation I cannot believe that in 2025 this is the country I grew up in, was educated and
worked and when it seemed that communities worked together for the common good.
It is now broken, divided and frustrated by political policies.
The current Prime Minister may well tell us that his father was a toolmaker, but his administration seems intent on failing the elderly and those with serious mental health problems and generally, taking this once great country into poverty and clearly no longer with a global voice.
The mantra "money is the route of all evil" surely says it all!
Profit before the nation and its people, and the hurt caused, particularly to the younger generations by social media, and who Sir Gareth Southgate stated in the recent Richard Dimbleby Lecture had no role models in a fast changing and challenging world and in which many may see no future for themselves.
In this the 21st Century we are so often told by politicians that lessons must be learnt, but given that many were not even born until after the second world war they take no account of the history and what led up to it!
This country should now be at the centre in calling for world peace and a better understanding of the causes of conflict between religious factions, cultural differences and the reason(s) why political leaders do so across the globe.
In my days in secondary education I would have liked my history curriculum to have been about the Romans, 1066 and after and then more up to date history from 1900 and what led to the two world wars, rather than the Tudors. Such history could prevent the current situations around the world.
Donald J Trump is quite right to call for peaceful solutions to these conflicts in both the Middle East and Ukraine. his methods may be strange but if he succeed in both is clearly unknown at this time.
Sabre rattling by others will certainly not help the situation, but careful forward planning, and the necessary compomises between all factions may do so.
The defence of secure borders where necessary may well contribute to more and more peaceful situations.
Whether they have the ability of free speech or express their opinions - or not as we know in some countries - do we not all imagine that all people want the right to a peaceful life out of poverty, not only for themselves but for their children and descendants.
It is clearly for politicians to put their nation and its people first every time and make sure they all have a decent standard of living in this 21st Century.
— A. M. WADDINGTON, Sutton-on-Trent.
I see that Mr Roulstone has now written a response to the letter I wrote about the way in which President Trump is reopening his natural gas and clean coal plants to reduce US energy costs and to increase their industrial competitiveness.
I did not ‘overlook’ the ‘pressing necessity of addressing climate change’, that so concerns Mr Roulstone, because I believe that no such ‘necessity’ exists.
President Biden’s promotion of the notion of catastrophic climate change caused by human emissions of carbon dioxide and the huge subsidies he gave to ‘green’ initiatives have been a disaster for those western countries who have followed his approach blindly.
In 2009, the US, the Obama government introduced the infamous Endangerment Finding which stated that greenhouse gas emissions are unambiguously air pollutants and trap heat in the atmosphere. This allegation formed the basis for all Biden’s green subsidies and his restrictive regulations but has no basis in ‘hard’ science.
Donald Trump’s EPA Administrator, Lee Zeldin, has now been tasked with reassessing the suspect science used as the basis for the Endangerment Finding and, if it were to be overturned, then all those subsidies would have been unnecessary and may have been illegal and restrictive regulations will need to be withdrawn.
Meanwhile, here in the UK, Keir Starmer continues to pursue his Net Zero policies which are certain to Make UK Under-Perform and, by doing so, so will ‘MUKUP’ our fabled ‘dash for Growth’ but will have no overall effect on climate change or on the global climate.
Mr Roulstone has grasped the truth when he says “The stakes could not be higher” because the future of our small economy has been ‘staked’ on a dubious successful outcome for Net Zero.
The result of this dangerous gamble will be felt in the prosperity of our whole population but no other country will notice even the slightest effect on ‘climate change’.
We should all be worried – very worried!
— ROBERT SHEPPARD, Beckingham.
Nick Roulstone's latest letter (Climate Action Is needed Now, News Views April 13) has stretched the thesaurus to its limit using the following words: pressing, change, alarming, threatening, catastrophic, extreme (twice), unprecedented, volatile, uneconomic, damaging, threat, dire, critical, irreversible, devastating, collapse, and drastically.
I believe that people are becoming tired of such language, and that there is an ever-growing number worldwide who are turning their backs on this unaffordable and unnecessary race to economic oblivion called Net Zero.
Our children and grandchildren should no longer be subjected to the fearful scenarios that alarmists blame on man-made carbon dioxide emissions.
Anthropogenic carbon dioxide began slowly around 150 years ago with the start of the Industrial Revolution and has steadily increased until the present day, but we know that the climate has changed for millennia.
The causes for that are well known, with the primary factors being the variations in the sun's output, cosmic rays and the formation of clouds and water vapour, Pacific and Atlantic ocean cycles, soot, aerosols, and other cyclic events, few of which can be handled by current computer models of climate projection.
No right-minded person would surely believe that all these natural cycles ended at the stroke of midnight 150 years ago to herald in the Industrial Revolution.
They are as influential today as ever, and to claim that carbon dioxide is the main factor for the future of climate makes no sense.
— COLIN SOUTHGATE, Coddington.
