MY letter on the recent fuel crisis appeared in the BEN on the October 6.

Two days after it was published I was warned by a friend who is in the Bolton Labour Party that some councillors were greatly incensed by what I had written.

Since then a flood of letters has appeared in your paper, all of them mentioning me specifically by name.

None of the writers addressed themselves to answering my criticisms of what the Labour Party was doing or had done, but instead carried out crude attempts at character assassination. I was accused of being 'William Hague's poodle'; of not being the real author of the letter, indeed of being incapable of writing it and merely a stooge for some brainier genius in the Conservative Party, signing the letter as his cover; of being numerically illiterate and unable to understand the simplest of calculations.

These are only a few of the many such jibes, but the main theme running through all of them was that I was a 'Conservative lacky'. Up to now I have ignored all of these, but I feel that the time has now come to answer them and put the record straight.

First, to deal with the question of my Conservative Party connection.

Nothing could be further from the truth. I have no affiliation with any political party, neither Conservative, Liberal or Labour. I don't judge a party by what it calls itself, I have never been against any party just because of its chosen title. That would be nonsense. No, I judge a political party by what it does not what it says it is.

What I am against is a bad Government, and this present Government, which calls itself 'New Labour', is one of the worst I can remember with their arrogance and their refusal to listen to what the people who voted them into power want. (They say they are listening, but never do anything about what they hear -- which equates for my money with not listening at all).

Accusation

I would be just as scathing in my condemnation of any Government that did what our present incumbents are doing, it has nothing to do with party names.

Next, let me deal with the accusation made against me by several of the writers who attacked me in your columns, that of being a numerical idiot. By profession I am a Chartered Engineer, for the last 10 years before I retired I was head of a cost estimating and planning department for a large organisation; dealing on a daily basis with the collection, evaluation, and preparation of numbers.

For three years I occupied a similar position in a German company, in Germany, working to German Company Rules.

While there I travelled fairly extensively in neighbouring European countries on business, and believe I can claim a sufficiently good knowledge of the way those countries work to enable me to make a reasonable judgement of how our own UK business and tax system compares with theirs.

My professional qualifications are appended at the end of this letter. Perhaps those who accused me of having an 'inability to understand simple calculations' would like to write to the BEN listing their own experience and qualifications, so that your readers may best judge for themselves which among us is the most likely to be able to make a reasoned assessment of any facts and figures that may be given by a Government to justify that Government's actions.

I would regard it as highly unlikely that this somewhat unseemly squabble, promoted by Councillor Cliff Morris and his friends, will have done much good for the Labour Party's image. He and his acolytes set out to give a good kicking to a poodle, and finished up holding a somewhat larger animal by the tail.

Albert Hornby

C.Eng; MIMech.E; MIProd.E; ABTC

Glendale Drive

Bolton