Every year we have a tawdry process of the Prime Minister using honours for influence and to reward friends and donors to their party. Celebrating people who do important work for others in public service, the business/charity sectors and popular figures in the arts, sport and media is important and the main purpose of having an honours system. Political interference devalues the reason for having honours. There is no reason why an independent committee could not ensure appropriate balance in the awarding of peerages where the recipient has a declared political allegiance.

Our constituency MP's views are unacceptable to the people of West Dorset. David Cameron’s chief policy adviser helped to ward off cabinet pleas for assistance for black unemployed youth following the 1985 inner-city riots with the argument that any help would only end up in the “disco and drug trade”. He also warned Thatcher that setting up a £10m communities programme to tackle inner-city problems would do little more than “subsidise Rastafarian arts and crafts workshops”. The memo also quotes Letwin referring to plans to regenerate the riot torn areas of North London, stating, “Riots, criminality and social disintegration are caused solely by individual characters and attitudes. So long as bad moral attitudes remain, all efforts to improve the inner cities will founder.” There’s clear evidence that the beliefs he held in 1985 are still being enforced in government. In 2011, as riots again tore through the country, and as campaigners said this was a clear sign that poverty and inequality ran deep, the government responded as it did in Thatcher’s day, by claiming it was all the work of individual criminals – “those thugs”, as Cameron called them at the time. When he was shadow chancellor, he was secretly recorded telling the Institute of Economic Affairs that he would like to slash public spending by billions but that it would be electorally disastrous to do so. Again, there was no apology, with Letwin claiming he was the victim of “a farrago of nonsense”. In 2003, Letwin risked the Tories’ attempts to rebrand themselves as the party for ordinary working families when he claimed he would rather beg on the street than send his children to the local state school in south London. The Eton and Cambridge-educated politician conceded that he “wouldn’t mind” using a state school in his West Dorset constituency, but added that he aimed to get his 10-year-old daughter into “a particular public school in London”. In 2004 Letwin told a private meeting that the “NHS will not exist” within five years of a Conservative election victory. Paul Boateng, then chief secretary of the Treasury, seized on the gaffe, claiming it revealed the Tories’ true intentions “to abolish the NHS as we know it”. Mr Letwin, who is independently affluent; continued working part-time for a top City investment bank despite being a member of the shadow cabinet. Between 2004 and 2009, he claimed more than £80,000 of expenses for a cottage in Somerset close to his Dorset constituency. The property is in an isolated area and Mr Letwin claims for the cost of heating fuel and emptying the septic tank. (£4000 p.a.) During the summer of 2005, records showed that Mr Letwin took out a second mortgage for £100,000 on his cottage. Parliamentary records also showed that he charged the taxpayer more than £1,000 in mortgage interest for the property. He then increased the amount of mortgage interest that he wanted to claim back from the public finances by more than £300 a month, and told the parliamentary authorities that the new mortgage was to “fund repairs and improvement”. Within two days, the senior Tory telephoned the fees office to say that he had not started the work and had therefore “decided to withdraw the claim for [the] time-being”. The most controversial claim was made in September 2006. An invoice for £2,145 was submitted by Mr Letwin for “works ... to lay a new 25mm pipeline to replace the existing leaking pipeline under the tennis court”. The contractors also charged to re-lay the “turfs ... as practical on the sensitive area [around the tennis court].” In 2011 Letwin was branded “the most controversial politician in Sheffield” by the then deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, for allegedly saying he did not want to see more families in the city taking cheap foreign holidays. Also in 2011 Letwin was photographed dumping official papers in litter bins in St James’s Park. The Daily Mirror reported that Letwin was seen on five separate days binning sensitive correspondence in the park. The Information Commissioner’s Office later found that while he did not dispose of any government documents; the papers were his constituents’ personal and confidential letters to him. The latest revelations, that adds allegations of racism to his catalogue of gaffes is the last straw. We believe it is high time he resigned as an MP.

Kaveh Ghandizadeh Dezfuli has been detained by UK immigration authorities since the 15th December 2015, the same day he was asked to present his fresh claim for asylum. His previous claim in 2013 failed because British courts refuse to recognise the severity of the Islamic Regime in dealing with 'westernized' Iranian nationals who apparently tarnish the reputation of Islam. Despite submitting strong evidence that his many television appearances on the popular Manoto TV - a satellite station recorded in London and broadcast illegally to Iran - with known dissident musicians such as Shahram Shabpareh (a very famous Iranian musician and writer of explicitly anti-regime songs) make him a target for abuse, torture and imprisonment by the Islamic Regime, no interview was granted and the fresh claim was not accepted. Mr Dezfuli was given a limited notice of removal on the 27th December, informing him he would be removed between the 30th December and the 20th January 2016. He was not given at least two working days to challenge the decision. The only day the courts would have been open between the 27th and 30th December was Tuesday 28th. Kaveh Ghandizadeh is a great friend to many and a huge part of the London music community. Please do not endanger this person's life, in breach of the ECHR. This is a kind, honorable and gentle man who has never committed any crime (other than the 'crime' of being a westernized musician) and poses no threat to our national security.

To describe the UKs nuclear waste site as a “Repository” is putting a spin on the UKs main nuclear dump for "low level" waste. There is "controlled discharge direct to the Irish Sea" not to mention run off to the Drigg Stream and River Irt. Discharges to the air of radioactive gases are ongoing. According to the British Geological Society the Drigg site is above a regional aquifer. It is also "likely to be destroyed by coastal erosion" in 500 to 5000 years (computer modelling can be wrong either way) . Much of the waste is long lived and high risk. Below are a few of the reasons why it is important that Cumbria County Council Lock the Gate on Drigg: Planning Application PL\1508\05 (4/15/9012):The phased construction of additional vaults, higher stacking of containers..capping.. 1. Drigg Low Level Waste Repository (the word nuclear was dropped so as not to scare the horses) would continue to accept nuclear waste for decades to come. "Capping" is misleading. To cap” a nuclear dump is akin to putting a cap on a fizzy lemonade bottle while there are holes in the bottom of the bottle. The site will continue to leach aqueous emissions to groundwater and gaseous emissions to air. 2. LOW LEVEL: This suggests that the waste at Drigg is low risk and short lived. Neither is true. As the University of Reading has pointed out: “The Drigg site uses two disposal systems: 1) An original system operated from 1959 to 1988 comprising a series of parallel trenches excavated into glacial clays, back filled with LLW and covered with an interim water resistant cap. 2) Current disposal of compacted waste placed in steel ISO-freight containers, with void space filled with highly fluid cement based grout. These containers are then disposed of in a series of open concrete vaults. Radionuclides with highest activities in the inventory include 3H, 241Pu, 137Cs, 234U and 90Sr, 238U and 232Th. http://centaur.reading.ac.uk/16608/1/mrspaper.pdf 3. RADIOACTIVE FLY TIPPING: The chemical and nuclear dump site has moved on from the years 1940 to 1988 when chemical and radioactive waste was tumble tipped into trenches. Now the waste is compacted into steel shipping containers filled with cement. Incredibly the containers are stacked high. In 2013 the LLW management wrote: “in containers at the tops of stacks, the external capping grout has 
undergone extensive physical degradation and settlement; the lids are not full of grout, and the grout is generally heavily cracked. The state of the capping grout in underlying layers is better; most containers only show sparse cracking and typical settlement in the lid is approximately 15 mm. Standing water, sometimes contaminated with low levels of radioactivity, is present in approximately half of the containers at the tops of stacks. ..In containers at the tops of stacks, organic matter has accumulated beneath many open grout ports, with vegetation growing from some grout ports. ..Corrosion, sometimes fully penetrating, is present in some container lids at the tops of stacks…” http://llwrsite.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/30-RP-LLWRGR-PROJ-0139-Vault-8-Container-Issues-Project-MAS.pdf 4. FLOODWATER AND SEA INUNDATION: “The Environment Agency has given a formal view that “the potential for disruption of the site is an acceptable risk” By “disruption of the site” they mean inundation by sea and flood. This is a far cry from the Environment Agency's previous criticism in 2005: "BNFL (Now the NDA) has not yet demonstrated that the wider benefits to the UK from continued LLW disposal on this site outweigh the potential future impacts" We would hope that Cumbria County Council agree with the Environment Agency's 2005 findings that that the real and present threat of inundation of the Drigg site by flood or by sea is not an acceptable risk to the people of Cumbria or to our international neighbours. 5. THE COLLAPSE in 1985 of the largest black-headed gull breeding colony in Europe on the Drigg dunes has never been satisfactorily explained. The official explanation is that a fox did it! https://mariannewildart.wordpress.com/2015/12/29/disappearing-trick-birds-and-nuclear-waste/ 6. CHILDHOOD LEUKEMIA is officially blamed on "population mixing" due to the influx of workers firstly to the 1940 explosives factory (Royal Ordnance Factory) at Drigg and then the ROF at Sellafield. The irony of this incredible argument is that the plan for 3 new nuclear reactors at ' Moorside' a few miles from Drigg ('Moorside' is at the village of Beckermet) would involve a boom and bust influx of thousands of workers along with a further tsunami of nuclear wastes and ever more Driggs. https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/stop-moorside-biggest-nuclear-development-in-europe Many of the Councillors expressed serious concerns at the meeting and yet the vote was unanimously in favour which, to campaigners and the wider public, smacks of something very fishy indeed. To rely on the testament of the Environment Agency who merely look at the information provided to them by the industry is reckless. All projections and computer modelling are based on information provided by the operators. Much of the Drigg site is already unable to be accessed for monitoring due to the stacking of containers. At the planning meeting on 15th July 2016 There was no discussion of a. the increased possibility of criticality with an ever increasing radiological burden. The words criticality “will not occur” cannot be applied to Drigg's LLWR : https://mariannewildart.wordpress.com/2016/08/02/drigg-decision-we-are-caught-in-a-trap-no-way-out-because-we-love-nuclear-waste-too-much/ b. the ethics of denying future generations the right to protect themselves, c. whether to warn future generations not to dig or distrurb the poisonous chalice beneath the land. d. the ethics of adding to an already intolerable radioactive burden on this vulnerable coastal site.

To a certain extent, we take the Fire Service for granted. But at a time when we need them, they are there for us. These people spend their careers risking their lives in order to save others. They work under huge pressure just by the very nature of their job, the last thing they need is further financial pressure. Less stations means further distances and longer travel times to emergencies. Less engines means a station unable to deal with as many emergencies and having to call in support from elsewhere. Less funding means less Fire Fighters, less training and less equipment. The people who will be affected by these cuts in the long run are members of the public. Who in their hour of need, will be left waiting longer for a Fire Service which they pay for, but which struggles to get to them in time. Ultimately, further cuts to a struggling Fire Service will cost lives. If you live in Suffolk, you will feel these cuts when you most need this service. When you are having the worst day of your life. So please sign this petition and share it with as many people as you can now, so together we can stop Suffolk County Council dismantling our Fire Service and risking our lives. A series of Public Consultation Meetings hosted by Suffolk Fire and Rescue Service will be held across the county in the New Year, where you learn more about the proposed cuts and we can have our say. To attend these meetings, send an email to - [email protected] The public consultation meetings will be held in Bury St Edmunds, Ipswich and Sudbury, two meetings will also be held in the Lowestoft area. These are on January 28, 2016 at Wrentham Village Hall, running from 6.30pm to 8.30pm, and on February 1 at the Riverside Centre in Lowestoft from 6.30pm to 8.30pm. Please help to support our Fire Service and the Men and Women who work tirelessly to keep it running. Thank you.

By upgrading the mostly unused tower blocks this would increase the social and key worker housing stock. The Carpenters Estate has a Tower Block and houses left empty for year in an area with no key workers homes or social housing. The Tower Block was considered unsafe but was used by the BBC during the Olympics and is still empty now. Newham Council's motto is " live work stay" but the reality is quite different We need homes for the people of newham not just empty tower blocks sold to overseas investors.

I lost my husband to mental health just before Christmas. This has ripped apart and devastated our family. As a family we were failed. We were given very little support and information. Basically left to cope on our own. More needs to be done. Mental illness can be a killer like cancer and heart disease but it has a very low profile and funding. This needs to change and it needs to change NOW! More and more people are suffering. Mental health wards are full yet run on minimal staff. Patient care is lacking and community follow up is so stretched that the support just isn't there. We need to change this for now and future generations. As a nation we need to do something. Stand together and fight for more help. Everyone knows someone affected. Please sign and support me in this campaign so we can hopefully change the lives of those suffering. Its what my husband would want us to do...he wasn't happy with the care he had.

UK farmers are subsidised millions of pounds by the British taxpayer. Despite this there is no effective regulation or carrot-and-stick approach to prevent soil erosion, plant trees and manage rivers to properly manage river uplands and prevent downstream flooding. Promoting natural flood defences and flood plains is more cost-effective. The Govt needs to stop focusing only on last resort man-made flood defences and tackle the root causes of devastating flooding, addressing its own contradictory policies.

British children are being denied funding from the students loan company if they have not lived in Britain for three years before going to university. This penalises children of parents who are teachers, aid workers and average British citizens working overseas.

A strain of E.coli is now resistant to all known antibiotics. The way the resistance is held by the bacteria means that it will spread to many other types of bacteria. This will happen within five years and we will be reduced to watching our loved ones die from infections that have been treatable for the last 75 years. This is the end of the antibiotic era and few will realise the true horror of this until it is too late. Antibiotics are poor earners for drug companies and they will not spend their resources to develop new ones. Only governments have the means to fund these drugs and then control their use to keep them effective for us all. In 1924 the most powerful man in the world, President of the USA Calvin Coolidge had to watch his beloved 16 year son die from an infected blister caused by playing tennis with his brother. Please stop this from happening to us again in 2020.

Although the scientific community have understood the dangers we face in climate change this is only just beginning to filter into the general public. MPs seem to be very loath to understand the issues. People have been saying fracking is safe rather than understanding that it is another fossil fuel and will contribute to global warming. Its short term safety is irrelevant. Why not spend our time and energy cleverly to produce the gas for our carbon neutral future. Invest in the small because we understand the big picture. Who are the lobbyists that persuade our MPs to allow our landscape to be ransacked for something that will only encourage more extreme climate events? Biomass gas could be an income stream for our farmers and Councils while giving us a carbon neutral gas. Invest now in our long term future - not in a fossil fuel.

It's absolutly vital that all waterways are drained correctly and if the outfall being ditches or rivers are not clear and dredged fields flood and overwhelm the rivers causing them to breach their banks and flood defenses causing havoc and damage to property's, animal livelihood in flash floods and extra costs reinstating burst flood banks which could all be avoided if dredging of rivers and ditches were carried out yearly, it's such a simple process which could save massive costs in repairs and insurance claims.