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At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.
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Your support makes all the difference.Have our country’s stalwart reporters gone collectively gaga? Of what use is asking Boris Johnson, habitually perceived to be economical with the truth, if he lied to the Queen when asking her to prorogue parliament?
What do you expect? “Oh yes! I really pulled the wool over her eyes.” Get real. Ask him what her body language and facial expression told him. But then again, he’d circumvent the truth.
I continue to despair.
Fiona Coombes
Clitheroe
Project Fear was real
In answer to your reader’s very pertinent question (Letters, 13 September) about why the consequences of Brexit were not made clear to voters before the referendum: they were. But they were shouted down as “Project Fear” – mostly by the very same people who now admit they are indeed planning for fuel, food and medicine shortages, and the civil unrest that will likely follow.
The people have been comprehensively lied to from the outset, pure and simple.
Richard Walker
Malvern
VAT numbers don’t make sense
As the only organisation that has conducted detailed research on the impact on schools and pupils’ parents of VAT on school fees (article, 13 September), the evidence shows that VAT on fees would actually cost taxpayers money (rather than raise money) as pupils leave the sector and have to be educated by the state, when at present they cost it nothing. The way VAT works would also reduce the tax take. Labour’s numbers simply don’t add up.
Tim Baines, Rhiannon Cutler, directors, Baines Cutler Solutions
North Somerset
The cost of old age
When a new medical advance is announced, one that will prolong our lives, please will journalists ask about the consequences to future costs.
If one person lives one year longer than they would have lived, what is the typical cost to the country’s other inhabitants? One year’s pension plus one year’s NHS costs? Perhaps £10,000. This means we have to choose how we fund this extra cost. We do not address this issue. It is so politically sensitive that no politician will address it.
If the matter was brought to the fore by interviewers and journalists, the subject could then become a routine question and common thought in people’s minds and we might then start to weigh up the real implications of increasing lifespans.
We cannot fund this by increasing the pension age because humans wear out, and we cannot keep working longer. Do we fund it by increasing tax on the whole population? Older people only? Increasing tax on the younger population?
Jennifer Walley
Address supplied
Who is biased?
My MP Kwasi Kwarteng should not be allowed to get away with his suggestion, without apparently citing evidence, that “many people” think British judges are biased.
At any time this would be a highly irresponsible statement to make. In the current fraught political context his comments are outrageous. The man needs to be brought to book by whatever means are available.
Andrew McLuskey
Ashford
Don’t kill the badgers
There are no words that I can find to express my feelings of utter horror at the intended further slaughter of an estimated 63,000 badgers. This cull is being masqueraded as an attempt to control bovine TB. Anyone who has worked for decades, as I have, to protect our native wildlife from the hatred of a small but lethal section of our rural population knows this for the utter sham it is.
The Labour Party is committed to halting the badger cull. They are also committed to strengthening the hunting ban. I can only hope and pray that the many thousands who care about such things can look past the bloated Brexit pantomime for long enough to take in these facts, and consider them seriously when they vote in the next General Election.
Penny Little
Great Haseley, Oxfordshire
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