SIR – I must support your reader, D S Boyes (Letters, January 29), and say that I also see no reason, even in good times, for Bradford ratepayers to provide more than £700,000 towards the cost of trade union activities in Bradford. How many nurses or teachers would that support?

In these hard times that payment should be stopped immediately and the personnel involved removed from the payroll.

In a similar vein, Michael Dugher MP should be told very firmly that it is he and the Miners’ Union who should apologise for the miners’ illegal strike and hooliganism that it involved and not, as he suggests, we.

They should stop moaning as they brought subsequent events entirely upon themselves!

Ron Jennings, Priestley Hall, Bingley