BOLTON councillors call on the United Nations to send a "rapporteure" to look in to "a breach of basic standards in access to food, clothing and housing in Bolton" (letter Cllr Sue Haworth).
In the same columns, Eric Hyland wants more money for the police.
Currently, thousands of children across the world are dying daily from malnutrition, lack of safe drinking water, disease, famine, natural disasters such as floods, earthquakes, etc, and man made disasters.
Hundreds of families are drowning in the Mediterranean and Bolton council wants to divert the UN’s attention and resources away from trying to save these families — to Bolton!
I am not sure which political party Sue belongs to, but Bolton council recently found a pot of £300,000 to give to a local wealthy private firm of solicitors to tart up their offices.
Could that money not have been made available to the poverty stricken in Bolton?
On housing and homelessness, Bolton council "found" a substantial number of social houses in the borough to offer to take almost 30 per cent of the national total of immigrants on a Gateway scheme, to settle immigrants in the UK.
Good luck to the immigrants of course, but were there no homeless in Bolton at the time?
On food, the average Bolton family chuck enough food in to the bin each week to feed 20 starving children, our toilets flush with fresh drinking water, supermarkets dump hundreds of tonnes of food and we are about to have a street food fest in Bolton to "eat as much as you can stuff in to your face week". What food poverty?
On clothing, we give sack loads to charity every month. The waste collection service visit every house in Bolton weekly. Issue a clothes bag to households, collect the clothing, volunteers may clean it and make it available to people who may need it.
As a wartime child, many of my clothes came off a rag-bone cart, and I was glad of it.
As to the police, a few years ago the police force was at its strongest in numbers ever.
You now have more chance of seeing a giraffe in Westhoughton than a bobby.
Having buried trench-loads of staved children in Ethiopia many years ago, I find a stunt to call the UN to Bolton to be stupid, offensive, self indulgent and politically inept.
The real poverty in Bolton is political thinking and executive action.
Ron Shambley
Clough Avenue
Westhoughton
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