Wedding plan is just nonsensical

You report that the museum in New Walk is about to spend £300,000 to refurbish Gallery 6 as a wedding and corporate venue.

Some of the art will be moved but Councillor Piara Singh Clair is reported as saying "that none of them will be lost".

I should hope not! However, they will, no doubt, be removed to storage along with all the other works and exhibits which the museum has no room to display, thus making worse what is already a scandal of non-display.

All this so that weddings can be held at the museum at a cost of £490 a time.

To get a modest 10 per cent return on that investment, there will have to be 600 weddings a year, which seems an improbable leap from the nine held this year and the six last year.

This being before any add-on costs, such as an increase in staff. This is a very optimistic business plan, which I hope the council will examine with a very beady eye.

What the city actually needs is more, not less, space to display its hoard of exhibits, as the council itself acknowledged in the last year by attempting to buy more space on New Walk to increase the size of the museum.

I would suggest it is a false premise that the council needs somewhere else to hold weddings, which these days can be held in register offices, churches, chapels, mosques, temples, hotels and even a number of other council properties.

Councillor Clair is also quoted as saying: "Our long term vision is to have a better display of Leicester's art collection."

He seems to be suggesting this is best done by spending £300,000 to reduce the inadequate space available in order to enter a wedding market in which there is already ample provision.

The plan is flawed and the explanations are nonsensical.

Adrian Weston, Smeeton Westerby

Mitt Romney, the US Republican candidate for the Presidential election in November, has chosen as his running mate Paul Ryan, sworn in last week.

Mr Ryan is a follower of the right-wing philosopher of American capitalism, Ayn Rand, who asked her followers to swear an oath never to do a good deed out of altruism.

By asking Mr Ryan to be his running mate, Mr Romney has allied himself to this philosophy.

Imagine what that would mean if applied to this country: no Children's Society, no lifeboatmen, no National Trust, no Home Start, no NHS – the Republicans have sworn to revoke Obama's health legislation – no milk of human kindness anywhere, no gestures of kindness from strangers, nor from your friends and family, no generous returning of your lost purse, no help when your spouse has collapsed in the street.

If this is the path the US is going down, it is a bleak future indeed, not only for the US but for the world.

If you have friends or family in the US, who are eligible to vote, please ask them to think what voting for Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan could mean.

Rev David Clark and Mrs Sarah Clark, Leicester.

There is no evidence that turning the UK into a tax haven for the super wealthy benefits our economy.

What is demonstrable is that Britain's small and medium enterprises (SMEs) now produce in excess of 50 per cent of our GDP, are overwhelmingly British-owned, offer a wide range of skilled and unskilled jobs, and are now the backbone of our prosperity.

George Osborne as Chancellor should know this, yet he has burdened SMEs with new taxes.

Many are below the VAT threshold and are not registered, so have been hit by his VAT increase.

Corporation tax for SMEs has not been cut, unlike tax for big companies who are mostly foreign-owned multi-nationals.

His cut in capital allowance from 25 per cent to 18 per cent (ie the amount of money a company is allowed to offset against profits to pay for investment) means that British SMEs are now paying more tax.

It is time for Osborne to go.

Eric Goodyer, Colsterworth, Lincs.