THE anxieties of opponents of the provision of a weekly slot in the North Yorkshire and Cleveland editions of your paper to the sitting MP for Richmond, Rishi Sunak, have been realised (D&S Times, Sept 25).

We could have hoped for some local insights based on local knowledge and concern for the local good, but we got the Tory party propaganda from London on school funding.

There are numerous problems facing heads and teachers in North Yorkshire but not the one raised by Mr Sunak – the national funding formula.

Every head knows their budgets are being cut despite all the promises. Every head of a North Yorkshire County Council-run school knows the injustice presented by their schools being bribed (by doubled budgets) or threatened (by inspections), to leave county council control and become free schools or academies.

Yet for Mr Sunak the policy of funding formula for inner city schools is the problem.

Since Charles Dickens, John Ruskin and Charles Kingsley exposed the degrading treatment of inner city children in the 19th Century, local authorities, central government and charities, like the Rowntree, Cadbury, Pease and Bell foundations, have identified the special needs and challenges of inner city schools. Density of population, ever changing populations, destitution, poverty, poor diet, crime, made the school a place of safety and the only real opportunity to rise in society. The long term policy of special support to city schools, as in Hull, York, Leeds, Middlesbrough and Bradford, is not the problem, it's this Government’s policies on cuts in taxation and spending, and encouraging public sector schools to become private, at exorbitant cost to the taxpayer.

The solution is not re-routing public money from inner city schools to North Yorkshire, but properly funding all schools and halting the free and academy school wasteful experiments.

Mr Sunak's argument is analogous to saying that we need to re-route financial support away from the sick to the moderately healthy, from the needy to the successful, from the poor to the rich, on the grounds of fairness.

It's a case of populist ideology and we deserve both better from the MP, and an even better opportunity to hold the already powerful to account in your paper. Holding the powerful to account has always been the historical mission of the press and journalism.

Dr John R Gibbins, Sowerby, Thirsk