Cllr Barry is obviously learning the political game as played by all lunatic fringe movements, playing the man and not the ball.

I asked one simple question: could he or any other Green councillor deny the fact that there was less recycling now than there was before they were elected to council.

He took six paragraphs to attack me but never mentioned the subject that is at the very heart of Green philosophy.

I think your readers can safely take it that the answer is, no.

Incidentally, I have always stressed that I think that the local Green activists are, in the main, nice but misguided people.

I have attacked their philosophies not the people.

To state otherwise is simply untrue.

Speaking of which let's examine Jon Barry's disagreement with Cllr Gina Dowding - she says the world is overcrowded and that her party will seek to limit the birthrate but not by coercive means.

Jon Barry says this is nonsense.

Ms Dowding is telling the truth and so is the Green internet site - where does that leave Jon Barry? Green apologist Pamela White takes me to task for not pointing out the differences between socialist and capitalist 'globalisation'.

Sorry, it seems that you disagree with Richard Newman-Thompson who argues that the Greens are extreme right-wingers in disguise.

You imply that they are extreme left-wingers (communists) in disguise.

With the record of human rights granted to their people by communist regimes in this world I feel sure that your friends are enormously grateful to you for pointing out what, in your opinion, they really are.

Whichever they are, they ought to sail under their true colours.

If they did they wouldn't get more than a couple of hundred votes in the whole district

.

On population Marx was right when he said that, in itself, it did not matter.

What mattered is that each person should, and would, produce more than they consume.

I admire Gina Dowding for her honesty in her reply to my letter saying that the Greens would persuade people to have fewer children.

So, of course, said both Mao Tse Tung and Pol Pot.

I would ask her once again for honesty in answering the following question: what happens when your persuasion fails to work? If you sincerely believe that a woman getting pregnant in England is going to cause a child, already born, in Africa to starve to death, what do you do? You surely cannot do nothing and lett hat child starve.

What is a forced termination at two or three months when compared to some innocent child dying a horrible death? Which would you choose? That's always the problem when political opinions become articles of faith.

The fact is that te world is anything but over-populated.

People are now living better than they have ever lived and that includ

es areas where famine is a recurring problem.It is less virulent now than it has ever been.

By trying to restrict population in the parts of the world that are most efficient at production you will rob us of the means of helping those who are not yet producing very much at all.

Read Thomas Malthus (1798) to read just how wrong the prophets of doom have always been in this area. Finally Jon Barry pointing out that various prominent Greens have large families proves little except Orwell's theory to the effect that, some animals are more equal than others.

Ray Hill Lancaster