AFTER reading the article headlined ‘Invest in teachers, not in buildings’ (LT, August 10), I have to ask just which cloud cuckoo land does our new Lib Dem MP Gordon Birtwistle inhabit?

I don’t mind the headline – in fact I agree that more money should be invested in teachers.

But school buildings need urgent improvement as well.

He should remember the state the last Tory government left our schools in. Labour was left with a right mess. He must remember – after all, he campaigned for schools being improved at the time, or has power clouded his memory?

He seems to have difficulty with the amount of private cash being invested in new schools, yet I don’t remember him showing much dissent when our new schools were being built in Burnley.

He did complain, but only about the site of the buildings. Who can forget the furore or indeed the wasted money spent on the new unity college? If we had listened to him, the new building was doomed to sink his party.

Well it’s built and, to be honest, it doesn’t darken the landscape like he would have had us believe.

And we had the episode with the school being built on Rossendale Road and the hasty buying of some housing stock from Calico on Melrose Avenue in his belief they would build the school there.

So what are we talking about here? Hypocrisy borne of the desire to please his new masters.

But he should be careful – this government will not last and he will be forced to come back here and make excuses which I fervently hope will be thrown out by the electorate of Burnley.

K ROYAL, Burnley resident.