DEAR Editor, David Middleton’s recent Post article hits the nail on the head with regard to the several “crunches” - particularly climate and energy - that will be following hot on the heels of the credit crunch.

As he implies, intelligent public spending by governments, local authorities and investors would ensure their actions tackle more than one of these crunches at once. Gordon Brown’s recent announcement on public investment for job creation in green technologies fulfils some of these objectives and is to be welcomed. But a group of organisations nationally is promoting the Green New Deal which takes this further.

As well as measures to provide stable banking for businesses and individuals free from the global financial casino, the Green New Deal promotes the idea of public and investment spending on for example a comprehensive programme of energy efficiency measures to existing houses and businesses - answering David Middleton’s ‘big question’.

This would cut individual and business energy bills; provide training, create jobs, and potentially be a safe investment haven for peoples’ savings and pension funds (such as a Brummie Bond) that would generate a safer and steadier return than most, as well as tackling our energy problems in the most urgent and sustainable way - by reducing demand.

Localise West Midlands is part of a small group of organisations beginning to look at applying this approach. Our region is well placed to promote such an approach because we already have the ‘low carbon economy’ commitments of the regional economic strategy and several excellent profit and non-profit sector organisations that already deliver jobs and energy efficiency programmes across the region.

The next stage must be to investigate the business case, training capacity, building stock requirements and potential investment mechanisms.

We, too, hope that city leaders start to take this approach in their economic strategies. The region’s media, businesses, unions, decision-makers and communities all have roles to play in making this happen - to mutual benefit.

Karen Leach, Localise West Midlands

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Tories need to remember past

Dear Editor, Tory hopeful Dan Byles appears to be very young indeed. He would benefit from researching the origins of credit and banking deregulation dating from 1979 and we might then benefit from his opinions on the much-loved Tory mantra of the Thatcher era, ‘You can’t buck the market’.

His claims that debt-fuelled spending by our government over the last decade is the cause of all our ills, plus his outdated quotations from German economic savants (if he read your news items on Friday he would learn that Germany is propping up its banks, too) are long on rhetoric and short on helpful analysis. I trust the voters of North Warwickshire and Bedworth will take note.

Fred Wiseman

Showell Grove, Droitwich Spa

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Folly of monstrous spectacle in square

Dear Editor, Well done the Post for exposing the outrageous folly that is the Big Screen in Victoria Square.

The City Council has rightly celebrated the record numbers of visitors to the Frankfurt Market. But they seem to forget that those same visitors, for two years running, have had to make sense of the beautiful square and, at the heart of it, this monstrous spectacle. Silent, blank, surrounded by amateurish wooden boarding and often strewn with rubbish.

Congratulations to the Council and the BBC (the “can’t be bothered with Birmingham Broadcasting Corporation”).

Anthony James, Boldmere