If electric cars increase the possibility of grid blackouts, let’s invest in solar to create more power

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Finally, the government has realised its push for electric cars could cause blackouts as the grid comes under strain – unless it gains more capacity. Rather than requiring owners to charge at night perhaps it should make it financially attractive for more people to have solar panels so they can charge cars during the day.

J Longstaff

E Sussex

It’s the climate, stupid

It is now time for all countries to put aside petty squabbles to work together on an orchestrated, universally accepted plan intended to deliver the desired reduction of the globe’s fast-rising temperature. This one goal is the most important challenge that the world has been faced with to date.

Decisions made on climate control this year will shape the world of the future. If we delay constructive, positive action or get it wrong the possibility of having a future stable world will be lost. The dire consequences of a world heating up are too awful to comprehend – crops failing, water shortages, floods, severe storms, vast forest fires.

We have known for two or three decades that the world is heating up but very little has been achieved in managing action which alleviates the problem. But now time has run out for any further delay – we must stop the rhetoric and galvanise vast numbers of people into action.

In fact, if we don’t reduce the upward trend soon there will be no way we can have a secure, stable future.

I look forward to a positive, agreed agenda for climate control coming from the conference in Scotland. Delay action at your peril.

Keith Poole

Basingstoke

Vaccination passports

I support the requirement to be fully vaccinated to attend large events, but not to prevent access to healthcare and food shopping. I believe this to be a proportional response to balance the rights of individuals to say no to the jab and the rights of people to feel safer when attending large events.

I hope anyone who is against this proposal on a point of loss of civil liberties can see the irony. This government’s legislative programmes are much more frightening and dangerous in reducing our freedoms – including the right to protest. Most right-wing Conservative MPs who oppose these vaccine passports will, I assume, continue to support such bills?

N Smith

West Sussex

Hi-vis chain-gangs

Boris Johnson has vowed to target “crime and anti-social behaviour” by tagging criminals, putting them in identifying high visibility jackets and setting them to carry out unpaid work in chain-gangs.

Coincidentally Boris Johnson and his cabinet members are often shown in the media visiting building sites and factories as they try to sell the fiction of an economically dynamic “Global Britain”.

Johnson can hardly be seen on TV these days without a hard hat and in a fluorescent vest. This has taken on a new significance with Johnson’s new policy of identifying anti-social criminals with reflective vests.

Johnson’s handling of coronavirus has been a textbook definition of“anti-social”.

Sasha Simic

London

Defending the NHS

Two recent letters, by Dr John Cameron and Philip Duval, have been critical of the NHS. Dr Cameron states that our service is worse than others even though we spend “pretty much the European average on health care” and Philip Duval regards it as “hugely overrated”.

Available data would indicate otherwise. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), across a whole range of health and health outcome indicators, the UK is at or better than the OECD average. Again, according to the OECD, our per capita expenditure on health care is about the OECD average.

However, what is clearly apparent is that the countries that we as a nation should at least aspire to be similar to (Germany, France, the Netherlands, the Scandinavian nations, Ireland etc.) spend more per capita on health and employ more doctors and nurses per 1,000 of population.

Overall, the data suggests that we get value for money from our NHS, but the input and output are average. The real issue is: do we want to aspire to the sort of health care systems and outcomes that are enjoyed by what we would regard as our peer countries or merely continue to be average?

Kevin Murphy

Southampton

Stop, stop and search

I could not agree more with your editorial Extending Stop and Search powers is a grave mistake.

Because even the police themselves see this as a step too far, with very few proactive statistics to back it up. The prime minister with his hardline home secretary is endeavouring to shore up his traditional fan base with yet more draconian and possibly self-defeating proposals.

It was totally bad form not to involve the police in these new measures, probably because they would have legitimately thrown cold water over these authoritarian proposals. Of course, the public wants and demand safer streets, but they can also see through a heavy-handed approach, which is not worth the inevitable comebacks and possible unfairness and division.

Judith A. Daniels

Norfolk