I AM grateful Kris Hopkins found time to respond to my letter (Keighley News, May 4), especially during this period of electioneering.

However, I feel I should reply to him as he seems not to have understood what I was getting at.

I am not ‘cynical’ by nature but I am sceptical of political systems that appear to serve those elected more than those who elected them.

Also, could I remind him that cynicism was a respectable philosophy to adopt in ancient Greece, at about the same time as our modern notion of democracy emerged; in other words, as a way of coping with politicians who sometimes mould the truth for their own purposes.

I am not unaware of the efforts being made to eradicate the widespread trade in drugs in Keighley and I wholeheartedly applaud any success in this healthy direction.

But my point really was that if it is difficult now for people to come forward with information about drug-dealing, it was doubly so for people who knew about the traffic in young girls, partly because they did not meet with the same positive response – all the more reason for a full-scale inquiry into a national network of serious criminal activity within which Keighley was a significant piece of the jigsaw.

To its great credit, the Keighley News regularly carries items about issues that are socially and politically difficult locally. Often you end the piece with the question ‘What do you think?’.

Might I be allowed to reverse the situation? What does Mr Hopkins think about Judge Roger Thomas’s decision to arrive at what seems to me a light sentence for a long-term habitual supplier of Class A drugs? This presumably would be an example of the success of the anti-drugs campaign. And yet Operation Saucerlake must have cost a great deal of money and a lot of danger for the undercover police officers involved (Keighley News, April 13).

This is not just a question of the waste of public money, it is a waste of the goodwill of the people of Keighley who are brave enough to speak up.

I repeat, I am grateful Mr Hopkins took time to reply to my letter; I just wish he had read it a little more closely.

CHRISTOPHER ACKROYD Bethel Street, East Morton