A reality check on immigration claims - your letters, plus an RAF adventure snapshot from 1962

​Ratcliffe’s point was absurd

Chris Smith (letter 21 February) asserts "debate over immigration" is being "stifled". Really? He/she makes this assertion in a letter intended for publication in a newspaper. It would seem to me that it is extremely difficult to avoid people droning on about immigration, even in the most unlikely of places. I look at a picture on a nostalgic Facebook page dedicated to historic photos of my home town, and somebody comments ‘how lovely Walsall looked in 1976 when the streets were free of litter and immigrants’, before slithering back under his rock without noticing that the photo was posted by a bloke named Patel.

Chris further asserts Ratcliffe was right. No. Ratcliffe's figures for immigration to the UK were absurd and rested on population figure for 2020 a mere nine million out. I would have to concede that Ratcliffe does have personal experience as an immigrant to Monaco. 

The septuagenarian Ratcliffe is also fleeing the UK because he doesn't want to pay his fair whack of tax. This is a rather different situation from the famous "military age man" sensibly scarpering from a country where he is likely to be conscripted by some faction in a civil war.

Alan Harrison, Midlands

How will HS2 help Shropshire?

During a recent visit to Birmingham, commenting on HS2, Chancellor Rachel Reeves insisted the government will 'get trains running' but with no date confirmed.

That must set pulses racing in Wolverhampton and the wider West Midlands region, most of which won't have a direct connection to it.

Yet she claims HS2 will bring 'More good jobs paying decent wages in Birmingham, but also right across the West Midlands'. Like most people in government, she doesn't grasp that the West Midlands is a much wider region than just Birmingham. It extends well beyond the county boundary into Staffordshire, Shropshire and other neighbouring Shires.

Shropshire has very limited connections into the rail, metro and bus network of the WM, despite it's proximity. So how will HS2, which we have all thrown huge amounts of money at, benefit us?

Yes it has encouraged investment in areas close to its termini, much of it around Old Oak Common in London. But what about the rest of us? The answer is it's a London centric project with some modest benefits to central Birmingham. The majority of us will rely on the creaking, under-invested West Coast Main line as our direct connection with the capital… and many of us don't even have a good link to that.

So how are young people in Shropshire supposed to access these jobs?

HS2 may create an investment scramble to those choice sites near the termini, whilst abstracting it from the wider regions like Shropshire and Staffordshire that, because of poor connectivity, could be investment losers. Even Wolverhampton may get only modest benefits, being at the opposite end of the conurbation.

Rachel Reeves needs to understand that when she uses the term 'West Midlands' she really means Birmingham...yet all of us stumped up the money.

Mike Crump, Bridgnorth

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