Letter to David Smith MP - 30th July 2024

This is a letter I sent to my MP, David Smith (Labour) which remains unanswered 6 months later. Is it any wonder we lose faith in our politicians?

David Smith MP. House of Commons. LONDON SW1A 0AA

30th July 2024

Dear Mr Smith

I am writing to you in your capacity as the Labour MP for North Northumberland, having been elected less than one month from the date of this letter, I had hoped for better from a Labour Government but I am entirely unsurprised at the direction of travel.

I am utterly appalled that one of the first actions of The Government is to remove the longstanding (introduced by Labour) winter fuel payment (WFP) of £300 to pensioners, adversely affecting approximately ten million people. This has been promoted as being “means tested” when it is not, it is a blanket cut. The means of individuals to manage without it has not been tested at all.

My wife and I have both retired after a lifetime of work in the NHS, we have never claimed benefits and the WFP was our sole “benefit”. We paid into the system (Income Tax and NI) throughout our working lives in the belief that what we were paying into would deliver certain anticipated benefits and services. My wife, also a cancer survivor, was also hugely impacted by the WASPI scandal which cost her years of State Pension payments when her pension was delayed without warning.

I also note the scrapping, by the new Labour Government, of the proposed Care Costs Cap (CCC), once again leaving millions facing an uncertain future. This is a further early indication of the fact that politicians of all parties simply cannot be trusted and that what they say, or do not say, before an election is utterly meaningless.

I do not, I am sure, need to point out that neither the scrapping of the WFP or the CCC were mentioned by Labour, or you personally in your pre-election literature, prior to the election itself. This is as shocking as it is predictable, it will I am sure also be just the beginning.

By vastly reducing our use of heating and hot water my wife and I had managed to reduce our monthly energy standing order to just over £100 per month. This meant that the £300 WFP made a massive contribution to our fuel costs over the winter months of December, January and February. The Government, of which You are a part, has done this without prior warning and almost immediately after being voted into power, this is an utter betrayal.

Based on these early indicators it is our intention to sell our house and move into rented property which we will pay for from the sale of our house, as we believe that Your Government will continue with it’s tax raising and benefits cutting agenda. It is clear that those who have worked hard and been provident will be penalised to fund those who have been idle and feckless. Your Government would have been better advised to target the black economy where millions avoid paying tax and NI contributions whilst simultaneously creaming off benefits instead of taking the easy option of taking from older people.

Once we have sold our home we plan to spend what we can before we die, or become completely incapacitated, at least then we will have some pleasure from our decades of hard work rather than seeing anything we have swallowed up in care costs. If we run out of money Your Government can then pick up the bill, and foot the costs of our future dependence on benefits.

Yours sincerely,

Evernote - A short summary for potential student users…

Consider Evernote to be a filing system for pretty much everything in your life. You can use it to keep a diary, to take notes, to store scanned documents, photographs, sound recordings, web clips, useful URLs, pretty much everything you can think of.

Evernote allows you to not only store these things but to arrange them into individual notes, to combine notes into notebooks and to combine notebooks into stacks of notebooks. Individual notes can be tagged with keywords allowing you to group together and retrieve invididual notes which might individually be stored in quite separate notebooks.

Evernote can be used to store for example all the work produced in a school or university course and to keep material together which is part of an individual project. All the text typed in an Evernote note is fully indexed and can be very quickly searched allowing information to be retrieved very quickly and efficiently.

Individual notes or notebooks can be shared and notes can also be posted onto social media such as Facebook and Twitter if you want material you have produced to be available to a wider audience or to allow someone to see “work in progress” if for example you wanted to show a tutor a draft of a piece of work for advice or support before final submission.

The material in Evernote can be accessed via three main routes:

A Desktop Application. Can be downloaded free of charge for either Windows or Macintosh computers. This is definitely the option which allows you to access the full set of Evernote features and is the method of choice when working seriously on a project, indexing material etc. Using the desktop application also allows you to work on groups of notes simultaneously and allows you to generate a table of contents for a notebook which is a very useful feature if dealing with coursework for example.

Over The Web. This is very useful if you find yourself using a shared computer as might be the case in a library or at someone else’s house. By going to the Evernote website at www.evernote.com and entering your login credentials you can use the basic features of Evernote and access all your documents online. This is a useful facility to have, particularly if you do not have a computer of your own.

The Evernote iOS Application. Can be downloaded free of charge for the iPhone and the iPad. Using this application you can access all your material wherever you are. The application makes available many, but not all, of the functions of the Desktop Application and is ideal for quickly capturing information or ideas whilst you are out and about or making quick notes as part of an ongoing project. For many people the iOS application is the method they will most frequently use to access their Evernote account.

A major feature of the Evernote system is that no matter how you choose to access your Evernote account any changes, additions OR DELETIONS will be synchronised to all your other devices, this means that you will always be working on the latest version of your work no matter how you are accessing your account. You need to bear in mind that though the Evernote servers are fully secure and backed up if you delete material say using your iPhone, when you access your account using the Desktop Application the material will also have been deleted from there.

There are many many features that can make life easier and more efficient, one such feature is the ability to set date and time reminders on individual notes. For example, you may be working on an ‘A’ Level project and you may have notes about the subject that you need to follow up or complete before a deadline. You can set a reminder to let you know well in advance of when something is due so that everything is completed or handed in on time, though you do actually have to do the work, not just set the reminder!

Evernote is an ideal way to keep a journal or to simply record when things have happened so that they can be recalled later. Take something like work experience, you might start a notebook called “Personal Development” and within that notebook have notes entitled “Work Experience”, “Personal Statement”, “Volunteering”, “Holiday Jobs” etc. In each if these notes you can add text as and when things happen and then at some future point all that information will be available to you, it will be invaluable and you will be surprised how quickly it builds up.

The above example is also a good example of the use of tags. You might set up a tag called “CV Note” or something like that. As things happen in your life such as learning a new and important skill (such as using Evernote!) you would apply the tag “CV Note” to that note. Then, when you came to need to pull together a CV for an application you would simply go to your Evernote account and select all notes tagged “CV Note” and there will be a list of your achievements and learning all ready as the starting point for your CV without having to sit and think about it, it’s brilliant.

The above only scratches the surface of what Evernote can do for you at this stage in your life. Some effort and consistency is required in order to get the benefits but the long terms benefits when heading towards higher education are simply enormous, a system like this genuinely has the potential to change your life and to put you many steps ahead of the competition, and competition out there is fierce these days.

Accident & Emergency Problems

I just don’t get why the politicians want to arrange yet another “summit” to resolve the apparent problems with A&E services when the solution is so blindingly obvious.

There are simply far too many people attending A&E in the first place who should not be there, so send them away. Instead of seeing a “triage nurse” there should be a senior doctor, a consultant, greeting the patients and filtering out all the patients who should be seeing their GP and advising them that they will not be seen in an accident and emergency department.

Or does that actually involve using the word “No” in these “I know my rights” days? Same goes for the stupid 999 calls which abuse the service, send the originator a bill.