SIR – The sale of the DEFRA site for even more housing will increase the city traffic  by on average another two cars for every new building.
The government gives a grant for each new house but when will they consider the effect on Worcester’s traffic problems as at present it is said we do not need a completed ring road.
 There does not seem to  be any thought as to the needs for new schools and doctors’ surgeries to cater for the extra people coming to live in our city.
The present schools will have a job to cope and the doctors’ secretary recently said that many doctors are thinking of leaving their practice due to stress caused by long hours etc.Fewer people are being attracted to the career due to the thought of such conditions.
PHIL PEGLER
Worcester

There’s certainly no democracy in the EU
SIR – The EU gets its way again...
Assisted by German bankers and the European Central Bank, it belittled, bewildered and bullied Greek PM Tsipras long enough to force his resignation. It made him ignore a democratic referendum wherein Greeks rejected the EU bailout terms – as a Victorian dad might punish a naughty child, they forced a new bailout, more austere and humiliating than before.
In January, Tsipras had swept to power, he dared defy the EU with that alien concept: direct democracy via plebiscite. Imagine their laughter when a broken Tsipras agreed a third humiliating bailout then resigned this month. The German paw is free of the thorn and their banks haven’t lost a cent.
It’s nothing new: The EU has had grubby fingers in the Greek pie for years. In 2012, Greek parties met their president to form a coalition government. Unbelievably, EU heads of state invited themselves to this supposedly sovereign meeting to submit their recommendation for Greek PM! Their successful recommendation was ex-vice president of the European Central bank, Mr Papademos. Shame.
EU cheerleaders claim inclusivity, democracy. Seriously?
Annexation of Greece by German banks?
Telling Ireland its first referendum was wrong?
Blocking IMF lending to Italy until elected then-President Berlusconi was replaced with EU technocrat Mario Monti?
Supporting a coup against Ukraine’s democratically elected president?
Expecting we vote on EU membership in 2017 yet delaying renegotiations until 2018?
The EU is many things but democratic it certainly is not.
End the nonsense. Vote No.
JACKIE BURNETT
Worcester

War was not a game of cowboys and Indians
SIR – Councillor Alan Amos is 100 per cent correct about dropping the atom bomb.
Britain and alles were fighting wicked, evil, barbaric, Japanese sadists and the SS Gestapo.
The Japanese carried out horrendous acts of brutal sadism on all prisoners captured who must have begged/prayed to die.
It’s alright for luxury armchair spectators saying it was wrong to drop atom bomb 70 years later. Please use your useless incompetent brains. Britain was not fighting a 1939-45 schoolboy game of cowboys and Indians. It was a case of kill, exterminate and destroy or be destroyed.
Don’t you gullible fools realise if Hitler and Japan had won the war all your ancestors would have gone in gas chambers or even worse, very many years ago. You would never have been born.
Finally any readers letters attacking Alan Amos is an outrageous insult to all those extremely brave men and women who gave their lives fighting for British freedom, so callous uncaring armchair spectators could live.
K HEMMING
Worcester

Would we have closed the doors on Jews?
SIR – A couple of weeks ago Owen Cleary in his first letter regarding the turmoil in the middle east and the resultant refugee crisis made some sweeping generalisations as to what brought it about.
 In it he stated that we are not responsible as Laurence of Arabia had the whole thing resolved after the end of the Great War.
The fact of the matter was that the spoils coming from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire were split up amongst the nomadic local tribes  that backed the winning side. The only thing that they had in common was that they hated each other with a vengeance. Remember that the Sunni, Shiite, Wahabis and Alawhites that had a mutual distrust of each other. The miracle is that it took nearly a century for it all to unravel. To say we are not responsible flies in the face of history, ask any British professor in Arabic studies and he or she will confirm this.
 To then extrapolate that we have no responsibility to help these refugees is not only immoral but illegal, remember that we are signatories to the 1951 UN declaration on refugee status.
 To conclude I would like to ask Mr Cleary if he would take his stance on refugees to it’s logical conclusion and would he have closed the doors on the Jews escaping the holocaust in the 1930’s.
CLIVE SMITH
Malvern