The shadow of Ken Livingstone will hang over the Labour Party for its tacit acceptance of anti-Semitism by both the current leadership and those in charge previously. This long term stance, whatever denials are made by Livingstone’s fellow travellers now distancing themselves from him for cynical political reasons, has stained their party for ever more. The well disguised mask is now slipping.

Geoff Robb,

Hunters Close,

Dunnington, York

An article about the Ethel Ward playing fields (April 30) and a letter about Mrs Shaw (Letters, May 17) took me back almost 80 years to when Haxby was a relatively small village.

The Flaxton Rural Council provided a basic refuse collection and from about 1937 employed two contractors, a Mr Hodgson of Wigginton with a lorry and Mr Bill Shaw with a horse and cart. He lived in a small cottage at the Wigginton end of North Back Lane, Haxby, long since demolished.

Mr Shaw and his wife, who was more robust, did a fortnightly collection from Haxby and New Earswick and sometimes on a Saturday pressed their schoolgirl daughter into service.

They were a nice family and on my periodic visits I always enjoyed tea and cake.

The age of the horse and cart was over, however, and in about 1948 the rural council purchased two purpose-built vehicles and provided a refuse collection service to the whole district.

There had been no house building for six years during the war until the postwar Labour government embarked on a vast programme of council house building. The rural council got 50 Tarran prefabricated bungalows, 16 of which were put up on Usher Lane, and then built the Calf Close estate of about 160 dwellings on land purchased from Kenneth Ward.

All the bricks came from the Strensall Brick and Tile works.

The present government’s failure to provide social housing for those families unable to purchase is a national disgrace and will lead to its downfall.

Bill Heppell,

Dringhouses, York