Readers' Letters: Harrogate's Coppice Drive was just resurfaced — so why is it being dug up?

Readers’ Letters is a free weekly column giving you the chance to have your say on issues affecting the Harrogate district. It is an opinion column and does not reflect the views of the Stray Ferret. Send your views to letters@thestrayferret.co.uk.

The following letter was sent in response to our article about Coppice Drive being closed for two months from March.

A few months ago Coppice Drive was completely resurfaced and  a virtually unserviceable road full of potholes was excellently repaired.

Presumably the organisation which is requesting the closure will be digging it up.

So within a few months of the resurfacing job the road will be dug up and the excellent surface damaged again.

Why oh why does the left hand at the appropriate department of our local council not know what the right hand is doing?

Alan Sanders, Harrogate

Reform UK is 'slipping'

Reform UK slipping in the polls again will shock absolutely no one north of Watford. A party that promised to be “different” now looks less like a bold new movement and more like a lost-property box from Conservative HQ. They’re collecting ex-Tories the way kids used to collect Panini stickers, except instead of legends you’re mostly getting the lads who spent their careers warming the bench.

The latest additions include former shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick, who defected after being sacked by the Tories this week, and ex-Chancellor Nadhim Zahawi, the most senior defection yet, joining a long line of Conservatives now in Reform. Add to that the earlier movers like Danny Kruger, Jonathan Gullis, Lia Nici and Chris Green, and it’s turning into the great Conservative rummage sale.

Lee Anderson insists he’s finally found a party that “speaks for real people”. I’d love to meet these real people; they must be rarer than hen’s teeth, given how often he claims to rediscover them.

Then along comes Nadine Dorries, declaring “the Tory Party is dead” with all the emotional restraint of someone revealing a shock twist on Loose Women. If Reform thinks this is the cavalry, they may want to stop by the co-op funeral home and ask about bulk discounts on wreaths.

While they talk a heroic game about “common sense politics,” Reform-run councils already give us plenty of shouting and culture-war confetti, but precious little in functioning services. If that’s the future of local government, most of us would rather stick with potholes and bin strikes.

And nationally, the branding isn’t helping. Reform’s rhetoric increasingly sounds like something you’d expect between weather reports on Moscow state TV; everything is a stitch-up, Britain is broken, and someone, somewhere, is definitely plotting. No one’s saying they’re taking notes from the Kremlin, but they could at least try to sound less like the warm-up act.

Then there’s Nigel Farage himself, a man who treats an incendiary headline the way a Labrador treats a tennis ball. Whatever one thinks of the latest accusations he’s batting away, it doesn’t exactly scream “safe pair of hands.” More “comment section at closing time”.

So yes, the poll numbers are sliding. Yorkshire folk are not daft. If it looks like a sinking ship and sounds like a sinking ship, they’re not climbing aboard, especially when the crew consists of former Tory MPs explaining they know exactly what went wrong, because they personally tested most of it.

David Ingham, Ripon

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