SIR - If you'll permit me to make a couple of observations through Your Letters, I'd like to make comment on two articles in your latest edition.

The ejection of the food bank from the private retail development at Craven Court highlights a local, national, if not global issue - the death of the high street for retail. Locals may be unaware that most of Skipton's retail, including charity shops - the ultimate recyclers - are at the mercy of property developers, many, not all, based in London, through large property development corporations. Some of the shops in Craven Court remain empty for long periods because the rents are extortionate - the free market is not so free, especially when it comes to the high street in many small towns, if not large cities.

Property speculators do not give a fig about local communities, nor their economic well-being. They, like big corporate retailers, including super-markets suck the lifeblood, as well as money, out of communities.

The truth of the matter is that landlords, particularly big absent ones, can afford to leave properties vacant, such is there size and wealth. This is akin to developments in the housing market, where huge numbers of houses remain empty whilst people sleep rough on the streets - many of the same people who have desperately been forced to depend on food banks due to in-necessarily enforced austerity by uncaring governments, who have put bank bail-outs before people, as a consequence of their greed filled approach to mortgage provision and the spiteful buy-to-let market that has arisen through the lack of affordable public housing provision under both Tory and Labour( Blair and Brown) governments.

Related to this locally, the latest proposal, perhaps ironically perhaps, on housing development, whilst on hold, reflects the local Tory Governments obsession with perpetuating a private housing market boom, which they -Craven District Council and their reactionary friends in Government- allow such developments with no care to the necessary public infrastructure to deal with the increased local population, such that it takes two weeks at least to see a GP, unless you phone at 8am and wait for 30 minutes in the hope of a 'telephone consultation'.

Housing over-development creates huge pressures on schooling, health, parking, 'public(?)' transport provision, all which qualitatively and quantitatively go down the ( (blocked) drain. No wonder there is still localised flooding, to which more housing development adds through run-off.

There are of course solutions to all these problems - not however the alleged 'free market', nor re-visiting failed Labour centralised state control. Many of the answers can be found in reading the Green Party manifesto, which simultaneously tackles the lack of democracy in our country by enhancing devolved power to localities and aims to restructure the economy to be fair to all and tackle the curse of an over-heated private housing 'market, homelessness, poverty and save the planet from destruction driven 'choices' of the post WWII baby-boomers.

The chickens are coming home to roost in England's not so green enough and increasingly unpleasant land - see Westminster's thugs, bully- boys and opposition ya- boomers, (as well as the Brussels ones, as parents and grand-parents, as now the 6th largest 'mortgage' deposit lender, bail out their children from the interest they've made from decades of privatisation shares.

Vote Green.

James J Paton

Milton Street

Skipton