WITH all the talk of taking back control from the EU, I would like our local democratically elected councillors to uphold at least one of those EU rules: those protecting our health from air pollution, and allow Malton residents to take back control of our health.

This they manifestly failed to do in approving 87 additional houses on the Showfield Lane site in Malton.

The latest annual council update report shows air pollution increasing to 10 per cent above the legal limit for nitrogen dioxide in 2015 in Yorkersgate and has stopped falling in Wheelgate and parts of Castlegate to marginally below the legal limit.

These are all locations which are seeing increases in traffic and congestion from large developments in Malton, now totalling 740 permissions since 2012.

As air pollution is now understood to cause an estimated 50,000 premature UK deaths a year, this is an absolute scandal. Councillor Thornton pointed out that health was valid grounds for refusing this application.

The five out of six Conservative councillors who failed to stand up to the Fitzwilliam Trust have failed the people of Malton and all those who work and visit in its polluted streets.

Conversely, I would like to publicly thank Councillors Burr, Thornton, Cleary, and Maud for their vote against the development and their excellent arguments for opposing the overdevelopment of Malton, the overwhelming of its schools, surgery, roads, as well as the air pollution.

I now challenge all councillors to state what they are each going to do to reduce air pollution in Malton, and to residents to start leaving their cars at home and walk, cycle and use public transport more often, and lobby their councillors for action to encourage this.

Ian Conlan, Malton

Damage is done

ALEX Tate-Smith’s distressing letter of anguish about the consequences of Brexit confirms that the claims made the Remain campaign have done real damage.

A large measure of that damage was done by repeated acts of gross irresponsibility by economists and the politicians who direct and pay them.

It is quite clear that no economist has ever been able to forecast with any accuracy beyond a three to six-month horizon. Forecasts stretching out further than that are demanded, and produced, by people who use them for support rather than illumination.

Within the City, this is accepted as an obvious fact. The decision to use a barrage of such phoney “forecasts” by the Remain campaign was, I regret to say, both cynical and damaging of public trust.

Since the future remains, as always, largely unknowable, the ability to respond to it flexibly and creatively is extremely important. Part of that is the ability to be able to get rid of policymakers who make the wrong choices.

It is abundantly clear that the EU institutions have failed these tests: their policies have beggared and are beggaring Southern Europe, yet those who inflicted them remain in place.

Far from being the product of trivial personal politics, the referendum revealed that the combination of a failed financial system and uncontrolled immigration is generating, and will generate, inequalities of outcome and opportunities which were unacceptable, and therefore unstable and unsustainable. The key task now is to work out how to build something better.

Michael Taylor, Old Malton

Make all welcome

WE seem to have been spared in Ryedale those vile manifestations of hatred, of xenophobia and of racism towards asylum seekers and migrants which are affecting other parts of the country in the aftermath of the majority vote to leave the European Union.

The vulnerable among us now include those Europeans who have settled here and who contribute to our society. They are rightly concerned as to their place in a United Kingdom, the leaders of which squabble among themselves regarding the right of such people to remain here in our diminished Britain.

Let us redouble our efforts to make all feel welcome and wanted. Let us try to recover our honour.

David Cragg-James, Stonegrave