DEAR EDITOR - Former Labour councillor Gordon Witcomb, asks what Julie Kirkbride, our MP has done to help UEF workers.

She has received a delegation of UEF workers in Bromsgrove and at the House of Commons.

She has engaged in copious correspondence with workers and their union representatives.

She has written to ministers to help save jobs and pension rights.

She has made clear on numerous occasions that the whole site should not be sold for housing and she will be meeting the administrators in Birmingham to discuss what remains of the pension fund for sacked workers.

If Mr Witcomb really wanted to pour scorn on people who could have easily done more, what about his own Labour Minister, Brian Wilson, whose letter to Julie callously claimed that closing the plant to sell the land for housing was "a straightforward commercial matter".

Or for that matter, his own Labour Government, given that the principal reason that lay behind the closure at UEF is the high value of the pound.

But isn't it really the case that the loss of people's livelihoods and the collapse of their savings for retirement are too important to be tainted by squalid party politics.

What a shame Mr Witcomb and his ilk won't see that.

Rita Dent,

Organising Secretary to Julie Kirkbride, MP.,

Bromsgrove.