Three years with no Swindon museum

Our large and growing town has now been without a Museum and Art Gallery for three years.

A decision was made by Swindon Council not to re-open the museum post Covid. Initially it was to remain closed, with collections in storage until the Cultural Quarter was built.

Then it was to be housed in three rooms at Lydiard House. More recently, there have been plans to house the museum and art gallery in the Civic Offices, which seems an admirable idea.

However, no work has yet started, raising questions about when Swindon families will once again be able to visit our remarkable art collection, museum artefacts and much loved ‘Croc’.

We said at the time that it was a travesty to close Swindon Museum and Art Gallery without proper plans to reopen it elsewhere.

How long will our town, already identified by the Arts Council as having low cultural engagement, have to wait before we have a museum and gallery again?

A significant part of our culture is locked up somewhere, out of sight. This is shameful.

The Friends of the Museum and Art Gallery will be marking the three-year anniversary by gathering outside Apsley House, the former home of the museum and art gallery, between 1pm and 2pm on Friday March 17, and concerned residents are very welcome to join us.

Best wishes,

Linda Kasmaty

Chair of the Friends of Swindon Museum and Art Gallery

Matt Hancock’s tawdry behaviour

In October 2020, you published a letter from me in which I challenged Matt Hancock’s assertion that “delaying closing down areas of the country means more non-Covid deaths and more economic pain later”.

I cited the government’s Chief Scientist who said that lockdown is not even close to being an effective tool to eliminate Covid-19.

In November 2020, I asked the question “Why is the new tier structure destined to last until at least Easter 2021?”

Then in December 2020, I was taken to task by Peter Smith for suggesting the government was indulging in ‘scaremongering’ when presenting the scientific case for lockdown.

I was also ridiculed for asking whether we could trust anyone in the upper echelons of government who kept on telling us that the NHS would be overwhelmed unless we played our part and ‘stayed at home to save lives’.

Having now spent a couple of weeks reading the Matt Hancock ‘WhatsApp’ messages and studying the key characters involved in the unforgivable act of ‘scaring the pants’ off people in order to make them comply with some of the most draconian acts of state authoritarianism since the Second World War, I am persuaded that rather than ‘following the science’, the government wilfully ignored the advice of scientists in favour of being able to exercise executive power and make political gain.

The most shameful aspect of the Covid-19 farrago is the collusion between politicians and the senior ranks of the civil service.

This is epitomised by the conduct of the head of the civil service who really did think it ‘worth a laugh’ to see the faces of people leaving the first-class section of an aircraft and having to spend their isolation in a Premier Inn.

We certainly don’t need a multi million pound enquiry to tell us what went wrong.

Mr Hancock’s tawdry behaviour, as evidenced in the thousands of texts, reveals much more than any legal text will say.

Des Morgan

Caraway Drive

Swindon