Stray Views is a 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.
I was in town this afternoon and witnessed 3 different takeaway drivers, easily identified by the large insulated food bags they carry, completely disregarding all traffic signs.
They regularly drive down pedestrian areas, park in disabled spaces and in double yellow lines.
I heard another couple remark about it. Where are the police or traffic wardens? The town was very busy this afternoon and these drivers are a danger waiting to happen.
John Franklin, Harrogate
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Ferreters may be interested to know that local Tory MPs Andrew Jones (Harrogate and Knaresborough) and Julian Smith (Skipton and Ripon) voted recently in the Commons to jail for up to two years volunteers offering alternative help to women approaching abortion clinics. It is believed the pro-lifers have saved hundreds of unborn children’s lives at the very doors of the clinics.
The MPs’ vote was widely criticised across the House of Lords.
Lib Dem peer Lord Beith said: “[I] cannot support a clause which criminalises a person who ‘seeks to influence, provides information or expresses opinion’m.”
He added: “This is the most profound restriction on free speech I have ever seen in any UK legislation.”
Similar sentiments came from Lord Frost (Con), a former government minister and Brexit negotiator.
The peers were debating the Second Reading of the Public Order Act, controversially amended by a Labour MP to impose throughout England exclusion zones banning pro-life actions of any kind within 150 yards of an abortion clinic.
Lord McAvoy (Lab), quoting the grateful personal testimony of a woman helped by volunteers outside a clinic, said: “If we make it illegal to hand out a leaflet with offers of housing or support, we embark on a slippery slope to bans on other leaflets with which we disagree.”
Baroness O’Loan (crossbencher), a former Police Ombudsman, warned the proposed blanket ban was unnecessary and could even be harmful.
Home Office Minister Lord Sharpe, closing the debate, described the clause as a disproportionate response to pro-life vigils outside abortion clinics and not human rights compliant.
Jones and Smith were supporters earlier this year of making pills by post abortions permanent. This was despite repeated assurances to constituents that the practice was a temporary expedient because of the Covid pandemic–and despite many doctors’ fears of the dangers of coercion of girls and women by boyfriends, partners and relatives.
Both also voted in the past against an explicit ban on sex-selective abortion and against independent abortion counselling. In their 12 years in Parliament, abortions have soared in England and Wales from 196,109 in 2010 to last year’s record of 214,256.
Tony Flanagan, Kirkby Malzeard