ON MP Neil Carmichael’s criticism of Stroud District Council’s handling of the local plan. Mr Carmichael said SDC had ‘procrastinated’ and failed to adopt the plan quickly enough.

Posted by Flash1971: Perhaps Mr Carmichael should recognise that the Secretary of State for Local Government Eric Pickles approved a housing development in Nailsworth (which was contrary to the local plan) that was unanimously rejected by both residents and SDC. This after he said he supported localism! This Government is full of hypocrites.

Posted by TigerTigerBurningBright: I thought Stroud’s was one of the first Local Plans to be adopted? Plus wasn’t it something like the Localism Act that abolished a layer of planning before anything suitable was in place. A developers charter. Who introduced that?

Posted by wlozinska: Oh, here we go again! It’s election time and it would seem that Stroud’s Conservative MP Neil Carmichael is unable to find anything complimentary to say about his own party, so chooses instead to try and mislead the good people of Stroud about the non-Tory opposition.

Carmichael’s article (April 13) accused Labour of delay in producing a Local Plan. In truth, Stroud’s Labour-led council had started on this plan in good time but Carmichael’s party in government then changed the rules part-way through, which meant they had to start all over again. This was the real cause of the delay. However, the plan has now been finalised and Stroud district is the only council in the county to have an approved Local Plan in place.

On the European Union referendum.

Posted by Phyllus Jones: The choice is clear. The UK can either return to being a self-governing country or move on to ever more integration as a province (sorry: ‘member state’) in an EU federal country. ‘Project Fear’ has used endless scare tactics to try and accomplish the latter option.