Author: Editor-in-chief

Press release from Andrew George, MP for West Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly: The government’s announced planning policy risks putting “greed before need” and is “destined to fail”. Deputy Prime Minister, Angela Rayner, launched changes to the National Planning Policy Framework, which the government says will meet its ambitious housebuilding targets – one and […]

Dear Editor, It has always been so easy to throw stones at authorities for their lack of vision and forethought, but who here are the real villains? We are informed by Dartmoor National Park Authority (DNPA) that they can no longer afford to keep the visitor centre at Princetown open. This centre has been serving […]

Some context: “Starmer wins backing of billionaire BlackRock chief: ‘He offers hope to British politics’ The Independent’s headline from October 2023 Dear Editor, The Bank of England base rate is 4.75 per cent. Effectively the UK can borrow slightly below this.BlackRock private debt fund currently advertises a yield (gross profit) of 8.4 per cent, which […]

Next year, Exeter will be celebrating the 60th anniversary of being twinned with Bad Homburg in Germany.  The town of Bad Homburg lies at the foot of the Taunus mountains, about a 15 minute drive north-west of Frankfurt. It is a beautiful spa town with a castle and splendid woodland surroundings. It is considered to […]

Petitions did not get very far under the Conservatives, but maybe Labour will be different? Let’s see! Here are some petitions that at least seek to raise the profile of some of the deep concerns we have about the direction of travel in the UK and suggest ways to address them. Please sign if you […]

The profound and relevant insight in the title is from American poet, Robinson Jeffers (1887 – 1962).   Does this explain one current issue; the inability of a section of UK voters to see and hear that our self-harming Brexit vote continues to bleed our economy and to warp our society? All  reliable economic institutions including […]

A few days ago, George Monbiot posted that he was considering leaving the site and suggested that maybe we all leave in a co-ordinated fashion. We agreed and the original thought was that a mass exodus on Inauguration Day might make a point. But….and it’s a big but… the idea of hanging around a moment […]

Dear Editor I cannot thank you enough for your ongoing support over the years for 3.8 million UK taxpayers who were excluded from parity of Covid-19 financial support by the previous government. There are so many ExcludedUK members, like me, who are still far from recovered from the pandemic and are still struggling to claw […]

Anyone who has read Rory Stewart’s book, Politics on the Edge, will have learned the uncomfortable, shocking truth that MPs frequently go through the division lobbies with little or no knowledge of the content, purpose or justification for the proposed legislation on which they are voting. Unless they have a particular personal interest or are […]

The Friends of the River Teign held their launch event on October 13 on Shaldon Beach, alongside the River Teign. The event was attended by Newton Abbot MP, Martin Wrigley, (Lib Dem) who carried out a water quality test, one of a series to be carried out through the winter by the group.  The event […]

News that the long-awaited Women and Children’s Hospital promised for Cornwall may never be built has been described as “shocking and disappointing” by St Ives Liberal Democrat MP Andrew George. The £291m project – part of the previous government’s New Hospital Programme (NHP) – aims to combine maternity, neonatal, paediatric and obstetric and gynaecology services […]

Dear Editor, My example of what I believe to be an unjust car parking fine. At 10.25am I received a parking fine of £100 for parking in a disabled bay with no Blue badge displayed in my car. I had been having a coffee in Castlepoint Shopping centre, Bournemouth, for 30 minutes that morning.  There […]

Shire Hall Museum in Dorchester is hosting an emotive photography exhibition from Robert Golden, offering an intimate insight into the lives and experiences of the Windrush generation, 25 years after their arrival in the UK. Opening on Friday 27 September, Searching for the Motherland features over 50 photographs of London’s Windrush generation and their families […]

We received this email: I am writing to you because of the car park penalty notice for we have just received from RCP. On 12th September we visited Bigbury on Sea, which was lovely. On arrival we tried to pay, but the machine was not working. Next we tried to open the QR code but […]

Reform UK are ditching their ‘Contract for Voters’. Pre-election, they dismissed other parties’ manifestos as lies. I think they now realise their Contract is utter fantasy. How ironic! They proposed that no-one earning under £20k would pay tax – guaranteed to be popular! However, they also proposed large tax cuts for the extremely wealthy (benefitting […]

I remember being amazed when I saw the sign on the A361 when leaving Barnstaple advertising 35 months of road improvements. Wow! How can they have worked out exactly how long it would take? Living in Swimbridge, we have suffered many days and nights of traffic being diverted through the village and then through Landkey. […]

We thought it might be fun (and interesting) to ask our editorial team and contributors what they are or have been reading recently. Do write in and tell us what you have enjoyed and would recommend (or not!): editor@westcountryvoices.co.uk. More to come! Dame Sarah Cowley, our Dorset editor. Someone Else’s Shoes, by JoJo Moyes. Penguin […]

As you will know, West Country Voices is run entirely by volunteers. We are not trained journalists or professional editors. We are ordinary citizens who felt unable to keep silent in the face of lies, injustice, corruption and division that were the hallmark of the now-defeated Conservative government. The relentless tide of cruelty, wrong-doing and […]

Dear Editor, In the July 2024 UK General Election, the limited company known as Reform UK ended up with five MPs, having received 14 per cent of the votes cast, some 4 million votes. Under proportional representation they would have gained about 94 MPs. This is a problem, because Reform UK has a political ideology […]

With some polls suggesting that the Lib Dems could push the Conservatives out if (a distant) second place, I asked Phil Moorhouse of popular YouTube channel ‘A Different Bias’ for his views on the matter. Could the Tories come third? PM: “Current polling suggests it’s unlikely…but only just. They are predicted to retain about 100 […]

Just because the Conservatives are set to lose power nationally, they are still able to hang on to seats where the progressive vote is split and/or ambiguous, thanks to our anachronistic and undemocratic first-past-the-post system (shared only by Belarus…) Fortunately, we can turn to the big aggregator sites like www.stopthetories.vote and Best for Britain’s www.getvoting.org […]

The Liberal Democrat parliamentary candidate for South Devon, Caroline Voaden, has thrown down the gauntlet to her Conservative rival, Anthony Mangnall, asking him whether he condemns the lying and the breaches of the ministerial code by Sunak, Coutinho and others. We think that all Conservative candidates should be prepared to answer this same question: Are […]

STOP PRESS: ALREADY FULLY BOOKED! BE QUICK NEXT YEAR, IF YOU WANT TO TAKE PART! A leading local conservation charity is calling on people in Devon to help it discover more about the county’s bats. Devon Wildlife Trust is about has embarked on the ninth year of its Devon Bat Survey. The research is believed […]

Dear Editor, “I so hate this f*cking government!”: my all-too-familiar comment on political events of the day  to Anna over morning tea and toast. The Today programme on Radio 4 announced that Sunak had emphatically rejected the EC’s tentative suggestion that a post-Brexit Youth Mobility Scheme should be put to member states. And Labour had […]

Dear Editor, We are drawing close to the first local election since Dorset Council became a unitary authority in 2019, which the Financial Times (FT) recently dubbed as: “… the most keenly watched ‘blue wall’ battle in a crucial set of local elections on May 2.” Under the headline “Dorset Tories tell Sunak’s MPs to […]

Dear Editor Much of the publicity about William Wragg and his indiscretion (notwithstanding the Conservative party’s best endeavours to suppress it) has tended to focus on the perils of modern social media. Surely, the blindingly obvious point is that the issue is blackmail, and blackmail is as old as time. As a former civil servant, […]

Dear Editor, ‘Disgusted’ doesn’t come close. Although even now I am still sometimes surprised by how badly these Tories behave, I am genuinely shocked at what Simon Jupp is up to. Jupp, the Conservative elected as East Devon’s MP in 2019, is attempting to deceive voters by purloining – for his own purposes – the […]

The statistics keep coming. 14 years of Tory rule leaves us with eight per cent of pensioners failing to eat regularly because of heating costs and other bills. Nine kids in any state school class of 30 are living in poverty (defined as family income below 60 percent of the national average). The Government has allocated […]