People won’t have ever seen anything like the Tour Congratulations on your excellent coverage of the build-up to next year’s visit by the Tour de France.

It’s nice to see some enthusiasm for one of the biggest events ever to hit Keighley.

As an exiled Keighley cyclist now living in Cumbria, I am amazed Le Tour is coming through my home town. I was born in Keighley and cycled with both St Christopher Cycling Club and Bronte Wheelers.

I still have a chance to read the Keighley News when relations visit or items of interest are posted on, and it is nice to read the exploits of some of the riders we raced against.

In the early days, every July at the St Christopher’s, on Monday club night at St Anne’s School, we used to huddle around the radio listening to French broadcasts, trying to find out the result of the day’s stage of the Tour. Not that we could understand French, but we new all the names of the riders, and Dusty Rhodes, who did understand a little French, filled all the times and positions in for us.

In those days, never in our wildest dreams would we have thought Le Tour would be passing our clubroom at St Anne’s, and that two GB riders would have already won the Tour. And now we do not even have to speak French! Most of the riders now speak English.

I will be back In Keighley next July making sure of my place on the long climb of Cock Hill, and seeing the best riders in the world create a bit of Yorkshire history.

All the best and keep up the good work. The people of Keighley will have never seen anything like it.

Paul Loftus Broughton in Furness, Cumbria Let badger cull determine who your vote goes to In the past few weeks, the Government has begun its much-delayed badger cull trials in Somerset and Gloucestershire.

This is a response to the spread of bovine TB among cattle, and has been lobbied for by the National Farmers’ Union, despite most evidence suggesting improved testing, vaccination, animal management and disease prevention would be more effective.

In fact, the Department for the Environment’s own £50 million, ten-year independent scientific study on the matter concluded ‘a badger cull would make no meaningful contribution to TB control.’ And 30 of the country’s top animal disease scientists oppose the cull, along with the Wildlife Trust, Woodland Trust, RSPCA and all respected naturalists, such as Sir David Attenborough.

The Government plans to kill 70 per cent of the badgers in an area, although they have no idea how many badgers there are. They are accomplishing this by using ‘licensed marksmen’ (mostly farmers), who are paid per badger killed. If rolled out nationally, the aim is to kill more than 100,000 badgers, a protected species under law. In the words of Chris Packham: “In spite of science and public will, the wrath of ignorance will further bloody and bleed our countryside of its riches of life.”

Keighley readers may like to know their MP, Kris Hopkins, in a cynical attempt to secure his local farming vote, is a supporter of this disastrous policy, and voted for it in Parliament (250 MPs voted against). This issue, as well as others, such as the destruction of buzzard nests to protect game birds, puts rest to the idea the Conservatives are the custodians of the countryside.

It’s worth noting the cull is also supported by the Parliamentary Liberal Democrat Party. I urge readers to look into the subject themselves, make their own minds up and vote accordingly at the next election. Tim Watt Haworth Correspondent’s rude outbursts and vague claims Surely the Keighley News is not trying to pull an April Fool prank in September?

I have spotted, as I’m sure many of your readers have, that Leo Robinson is not a real person and merely a figment of Tory central office’s imagination!

His rude outbursts and the vague generalisations in his epistles could only have been put together by some exuberant interns at Tory central office.

The comedian Stewart Lee once had a routine about a conversation with a taxi driver in which the punchline was: “Well, you can prove anything with facts.”

I applaud Mr Robinson for not only disguising his own vague opinions as fact, but dismissing other readers’ views with the well-worn phrase, “ideological left-wing claptrap”.

Week after week he finds a new issue that proves how much the Tories have done for the country in which he corroborates his opinions with no actual evidence or research.

A good example of this is last week’s claim 1,400,000 jobs have been created in the private sector since 2010 – ‘An awful lot is being done to help those people in poverty’ (Keighley News, September 19).

Mr Robinson neglects to mention the hundreds of thousands of public sector workers who have lost their jobs, the people working part-time on zero hours contracts and the fact wage levels are stagnating. If Mr Robinson would like to learn more about how his beloved party have created an impoverished underclass, then I would be pleased to send him all the research to back up my opinions. And please don’t add insult to injury by claiming food banks and homeless shelters are available, when they are growing at an unprecedented level due to the cuts inflicted by his local MP’s party.

I look forward to Mr Robinson’s vague generalisations, ‘left wing/socialist’ accusations and my proud membership of the Labour Party in his reply.

Antony Silson Skipton Road, Keighley