SIR – Your front page article in the Worcester News (September 29) by Tom Edwards is a very sensible and welcome comment on the traffic jams in Worcester.
Tom does not mention, though, another major cause of congestion and pollution. Within the last 15 years or so the city council has increased the off-street parking available in the city centre by some 1000 spaces. (Asda, Croft Road, Old Sheep Market etc and recently closed the two park and ride sites which has caused an enormous increase in the volume of traffic, especially along the northern routes, both in the morning rush hour and the evening too. 
These two short-sighted policies are responsible in no small way for the increases and traffic jams that Tom Edwards wrote about.
ROB PEACHEY
Worcester

EU is acting against democracy
SIR – Last week, the EU voted (by majority) to impose arbitrary migrant quotas on its states, irrespective of individual attitude. As well as being unfair, the EU has broken its own rules: According to the EU constitution, Union-wide decisions must be unanimous. Yet now, it ignores, nay rides-roughshod over, the will of smaller nations. Europe has seen this worrying precedent before...
Nation states who contradict the EU are ignored, those who disagree are ridiculed, those who fight back are trampled. Just look at Greece. The EU is behaving like a fascist state and I ask this: Is democracy dead in Europe?
Put simply, it doesn’t matter whether we agree with the attitude of Hungarians, Slovaks, or Czechs when they refuse enforced migration quotas. The only thing that matters is that the people of these countries, through their elected leaders, have said it. Since when has disagreement been wrong? Since when is dissent a dirty word? Such things are the foundation of democracy; crushing them is an affront to everything in which a democrat believes, whatever political party they support.
And these arbitrary quotas? They’ll never work because the migrants won’t stay ‘relocated’ anyway. Just like for those who were previously re-homed in Turkey, the ‘lure’ of Germany was and is, just too great. And all this the week after the EU itself confirmed only 20 per cent of the migrants in the Mediterranean were actually refugees fleeing Syria.
Let’s end this madness and leave the failed EU.
OWEN CLEARY
Worcester

How do you measure left extremity?
SIR – In the Worcester News on September 26, Robin Walker MP was quoted as saying that Jeremy Corbyn MP is “at the extreme left”. Jeremy Corbyn supports re-nationalising the railways and clamping down on tax avoidance, and he is against fracking and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). If people share these views, are they “at the extreme left”?  Our MP supports fracking, which seriously undermines efforts to tackle the climate crisis, and he supports TTIP, which is designed to benefit corporations not the public, and would seriously undermine our democracy. This seems extreme to me. 
NEIL LAURENSON
Worcester Green Party 

A tale of two letters on global migration
SIR – The September 29 letters page of the Worcester News placed two contributions about global migration side-by-side which displayed a fascinating contrast.
The toxic bile poured out by N. Taylor showed a total lack of ability to see the wider picture, urged cruel, selfish and inhumane response, and was all of a piece with the repeated dodgy home-made “statistics” on which he has built a letter-writing career.
He also, presumably because it does not start from the same position of ultra prejudice and ignorance, pours scorn on a BBC which is revered worldwide for its objectivity and lack of bias.
Geraldine Lowman, in comparison, demonstrated that she is a grown-up, informed and civilised member of the human race.
DAVID BARLOW
Worcester


Support the truly radical alternative
SIR – With Jeremy Corbyn’s election to the leadership of the Labour Party, Councillor Richard Udall has called on Lib Dems and Greens to “rip up their memberships” and to “support progressive politics behind a new Labour leader in a radical alternative to the Conservative agenda of fear, despair and austerity” (Worcester News, September 30).
In spite of a past long and active association with the local Labour Party, I must decline his invitation – which will be a great relief to the unbending Blairites in charge of the local party. 
Instead, I would invite him to embrace proportional representation, a core policy for the Lib Dems and the Greens, and drop his support for  first-past-the-post. 
There has always been a ‘progressive’ majority but Labour and the Tories have preferred to take it in turns to govern the country with a Commons majority rather than in coalition until the Tories were forced to in 2010. Under PR, you would have had mostly Labour-led coalition governments with the Liberals since 1945. “Fear, despair and austerity” is being imposed by a Tory government with a Commons majority achieved on 24 per cent of the electorate.
If Corbyn needs to do U-turns to hold his party together, the Green Party will always be there for the people, young and old, seeking the new politics they thought they were voting for under Labour. 
PETER NIELSEN
Worcester