Borrowing is a fact of life

I am amazed by the naivete, ignorance and selfishness of some people who are forcing Honiton Town Council to carry out a poll with the intention of gauging support for the building of the community centre.

The town council, whose members we, the electorate, have the choice to vote in or out at election time, has taken the decision after much debate and investigation, to build the Community Centre, so now is the time to let them put their plans into action.

If some of these people are relative newcomers to the area, they can be forgiven for being unaware of the history of the campaign, which has been carried out over many years, culminating in the present achievement of bringing the goal to reality. During this campaign, much detailed public consultation has taken place, always resulting in positive support for the project - why else would it have been continued? And do they think it likely that East Devon District Council, rightly respected for its prudence in public spending, would have given financial backing to a project that does not have public support?

Borrowing money is a fact of life. How many of us would own our own houses if mortgages were not available? Public spending is a fact of life - without it we would have no schools, social services, public libraries and numerous other services.

Of course, not every individual citizen wants or needs to make use of every public service, but we recognise others' needs for those which we ourselves do not use.

Of course, we don't actually enjoy paying taxes, but we elect those who are responsible for spending our taxes, and the way to object to this spending is by voting for the candidates whose views are in line with our own.

I only hope that if they do continue to press for the poll they have sufficient fairmindedness to couch their question in an unbiased way which does not influence respondents' answers.

Christine Tootill

By email