Why should watching football require alcohol anyway?

Letters to the editor: our readers share their views. Please send your letters to letters@independent.co.uk

If the Qataris choose to ban the consumption of alcohol, they are entitled to do so (Getty Images)

If the Qataris choose to ban the consumption of alcohol, they are entitled to do so. Why does watching football have to be associated with drunkenness in any case? But holding the football event in a country that oppresses and criminalising innocent, law-abiding people was always a flawed decision.

Susan Alexander

Gloucestershire

Tax EVs now

We are faced with huge financial problems now, yet our chancellor finds it expedient to tax electric cars only from 2025 onwards. A brilliant strategy as the Conservatives can then place the blame on Labour after the next election. Simply breathtaking.

Gunter Straub

London

The Brexit elephant

Thank you, Paul Johnson. For once the Brexit elephant in the room is being dealt with unequivocally as the ongoing disaster many of us knew it would be.

Judith Daniels

Norfolk

Cop-out 27

We deem ourselves the most intelligent species to have inhabited planet earth, but we may have to accept we are incapable of joined-up thinking.

As COP27 grinds to a halt, probably generating no firm answers to the question of how to combat the multiple threats attributable to human-induced climate change, many are eagerly anticipating the start of the World Cup, with its staggeringly costly carbon “footprint”, which began with building the stadia in a country with no significant tradition in football and will continue as 500 planes are used daily to fly in fans for what, in planetary terms, is the fairly frivolous activity of watching teams attempting to place balls in nets in power-costly, air-conditioned atmospheres.

Ian Reid

Kilnwick

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Pensions, pensions, pensions

It is disingenuous to compare private and public sector pay without looking at the very generous public-sector pensions available now to only a few private-sector workers. Perhaps now is the time to reduce those pension benefits in return for higher wage rises.

Philip Pound

London