LETTERS: Councillors and officials are destroying Harrogate

I am far from alone in feeling that ‘our town’ has been taken away from us and is being destroyed by the actions of our local and county council councillors and officials following their own agendas irrespective of the desires of the electorate - and in particular the residents of Harrogate

Until about 1974 ‘local councils’ were run more or less by local people - and the national Political Parties ‘stayed out of it’, but that changed 1979 or thereabouts and after that ‘it has been about voting for a national party candidate’ - and the councils themselves have been ‘very definitely controlled by national party placemen rather than by local people who took an interest in local affairs.

So ‘we’ have our council leader as ‘the leader of the national party with the most seats in the local council chamber’.

Moreover, unless someone is prepared to ‘bury their true principals’ and become a member of a national political party as one of their candidates, essentially selected by that party to be cannon fodder, then there is virtually no chance whatsoever of being elected, the result being that local councils are controlled by either those aspiring to be prime minister, and going through the party machine to get there or ‘the dross who have no hope of doing anything better but can ‘get into power’ on the shirt tails of the national political party machines.

And ‘those elected members’ “Do as they are damned well told” by the more senior people in the council or they do not get chosen to run again.

OPINION: Schools in Harrogate district can start to look forward after unimaginable disruption - Dennis RichardsI believe that it is high time that ‘the local residents’ ran our local affairs and the only way I can see of that happening is for ‘the local residents’ to put up candidates for election on ‘the local residents (party) ticket’ so that said ‘local residents, if returned, can actually form a majority.

Our town has been destroyed by the antics of North Yorkshire County Council and by our local planning committee allowing the building of thousands of rabbit-hutch houses with gerbil-sized bedrooms and gardens only big enough for a dustbin - tens of thousands ‘of bedrooms’ - not living spaces, far less ‘homes’ - with no thought for the consequences on infrastructure (or lack of it) compounded by green zealots changing what roads we have into cycle tracks while removing parking spaces (except those kept to fleece people to pay for the lastest fad) and making the town centre, which should be the economic power house of a town dependent on tourism, into an economic desert with boarded up shops unable to attract custom, far less pay the business rates which these fantasists seem to think are paid out of nowhere.

So how about it Harrogate residents?