Email
Madrid
August 26, 2008

Dear Editor,

In response to the letter in the August 7-14 (Nº 591) edition, which read "The British Embassy site states that there should soon be in place (Jan 2009) a scheme where early retirees may pay into the Spanish system to receive care. The cost has yet to be decided but is to be ’reasonable and affordable‘ with no health exclusions." We would like to point out that this scheme only applies to the Valencia Autonomous Community. The Catalan Autonomous Community also runs a similar scheme.

For more information about UK pensions, benefits and healthcare in Spain, please visit www.ukinspain.fco.gov.uk

The British Embassy, Madrid

Email
August 25, 2008

With the Olympics having occupied a considerable amount of our focus lately it begs the following question:

Why are sporting teams representing the United Kingdom entered under the name of Great Britain and not the United Kingdom?

Technically, under the name of Great Britain it excludes Northern Ireland and maybe other places under the umbrella of the United Kingdom as well.
Also, as far as I am aware Great Britain does not have a national flag, nor does it have a national anthem?

JB

Email
August 22, 2008

Dear Sir,

Regarding the Gilly Beaumont column:

Why on earth do you keep publishing this drivel?

Feel sorry for Paula Radcliffe? She let us down badly again, having stopped another fit athlete from competing because, for some reason, she was allowed to go on the team although there were doubts about her fitness and the other person was fully fit.

Why is Ms Beaumont blaming the government for the fact that some packs of food, etc, are smaller but the cost is the same? Do people not have the intelligence to check these things out for themselves?

The Government has better things to do than check how many nappies are in a pack. Anyway it is, apparently, better for the environment if people use the old fashioned nappies and wash them.

This woman is constantly moaning about the UK - if she is living in the UK then she ought to read emails we have had recently from friends still stuck in Spain and unable to get out because of the economic dive there.

If she is in Spain then she has turned her back on the UK and what goes on there shouldn’t bother her anyway!

G Cater

Email
Kings Langley
August 8, 2008

In a couple of recent issues of CBN Online I have come across letters which seem to indicate that wealth tax for expats has been abolished. Speaking to my Spanish solicitor, he seems unaware of this.

My situation is that I bought a property in Spain in November 2006 but live in the UK.

Last year my solicitor sorted out my wealth tax for me and I finished up paying about 220 euros although I had to pay my solicitor 100 euros for his work.
Can someone kindly confirm whether I will have to pay wealth tax at the end of this year, and if I do, is there a cheaper way of doing it than paying my solicitor 100 euros.

Perhaps you could email me at lovettatgolf@aol.com

Many Thanks,
Dave Lovett

Email
August 25, 2008

Dear Ed,

Please can I through your column ask the readers if they can help me?

Last September I laid a lawn from seed, a decent size. I was very careful to get the right seed for the job.

Mediterranean seeds seemed like the right one; poor quality water, bad soil damage and full sun. It was excellent.

Until June this year, then things started to go wrong. Bit by bit, I’ve lost nearly all my lawn; all I have left is brown, burnt grass. Where did I go wrong?
I don’t want to start laying new seed to end up like this again next year June, a waste of time and a lot of money.

Thanking you,
HM

Email
Mojacar, Almería
August 14, 2008

Dear Sir,

I am afraid that the heat has got to some of your correspondents.

I do not object to Ian Frewer, though I do disagree with a lot of what he writes, and have said so fairly often.

But I do object to silly letters like that from S P Bennett. It is full of ridiculous generalisations, drawn from the huge headlines of the British tabloids, which he (or it is she?) should know are simply not true.

We do have free speech in Britain, but the sad truth is that it is difficult for some people to accept that most people think they are wrong, and therefore come to believe that everyone is ganging up to prevent them from saying what they want to.

I cannot see any paper in UK printing Mr Bennett’s letter, simply because it is full of absurd exaggerations. Papers do have some duty to save their readers‘ time against this sort of rubbish.

I will just take up one point which recurs in severa l letters this week, and which Ian also bashes away at.

Whatever our views about apartheid or the Smith government in the then Rhodesia may have been, I am sure that everyone is appalled by the excesses of the Mugabe regime, and by the anti-foreign riots in South Africa.

Nobody can defend either of these things, and I am sure that goes for politicians like Peter Hain, who took to the streets in the 1950s and 1960s.

But what Ian and your other correspondent Mr Deller are firmly implying is that this sort of behaviour is typical of Africans, and that it would not have happened if the whites had stayed in control.

People who argue in this way have never put themselves in the position of Africans in old Rhodesia or apartheid South Africa.

What freedom of speech did they have? What political rights, the sort of thing that your correspondents themselves rush to complain about if they think they are being infringed?

They take for granted that, just because the British and Dutch took control of those countries, it was their inevitable destiny to rule them and to develop the land to their own advantage.

I don’t deny that the settlers created a prosperous society, but it was one which the native Africans could only profit from as servants and labourers. They were denied from the start the education that might have helped them to a fairer share.

Until the end of World War II, successive British governments operated on the assumption that the British Empire could be maintained ad infinitum.

The collapse of British power after that war showed that this was an impossible dream, and suddenly we began to be told that Britain ’was preparing those countries for independence‘. It was far too late a start, and dictated by necessity, not efficiency.

The problems that we see today are the product of a fundamental injustice which worked quite well, but which could not be maintained in the long run.
All the efforts by Ian Smith and the South African apartheid regime were futile in the end, and in the case of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe caused a war which could have been avoided, had Smith stayed within the law.

Without a war, there might have been no Mugabe, whose prestige depends on his record as a successful war leader. Unpalatable as it was to many people, Harold Wilson’s decision to disown Smith was the right one,

Yours,
Bill Campbell