If we really want to help hurricane-devastated islands like the Bahamas, we need purpose-built disaster relief

Please send your letters to letters@independent.co.uk

The deployment of auxiliary ship RFA Mounts Bay to the Bahamas to assist in the aftermath of Hurricane Dorian, one of the most powerful storms ever recorded, will be welcome, but is it enough?

I, together with the general secretaries of RMT and Nautilus International, the UK’s leading maritime unions, have previously put the case for a pre-stationed, custom-designed non-military emergency-relief vessel manned by UK merchant navy seafarers, to be stationed in the Caribbean on a permanent basis.

The ship would be able to carry significantly more humanitarian aid and disaster relief equipment than at present, and able to act as HQ and accommodation unit for hundreds of first response personnel flown out from the UK.

Uniquely, the vessel will have a dual role, being fully employed outside of disaster relief periods as a training ship for future merchant navy seafarers, engaged in humanitarian aid and ocean advocacy projects such as ocean and beach clean ups.

A new charity, Britannia Maritime Aid, has now been formed to design and build such ship and is now seeking both public and government support and funding to make this project a reality.

This year we celebrate the centenary of the merchant navy.

What better way to remember the service and sacrifice made by our merchant navy predecessors that to engage current seafarers in humanitarian and environmental projects, and at the same time invest in the seafarers of the future?

We need our ship!

Yours sincerely.

Captain Kevin Slade
Chairman and trustee of Britannia Maritime Aid

Magic Brexit tape measure

I want to tell you about the small matter of my kitchen table. It is old, and has served successive generations of my family relatively well, despite showing its age, with one leg just a little shorter than the other three.

A little while back, a young man came to visit who said he was a brilliant carpenter, and promised to make my table more stable than it had ever been. He insisted that I did not need some expert who would overcharge for poor results. He had all the right tools and skills, and it would be the easiest job to do.

Foolishly, I accepted his assurances, and he got to work. Out came his tape measure, which looked like it had an even longer life than my table, with some of the markings smudged, and the tape fraying at the edges. Apparently, this was some kind of a magic tape measure – we both just needed to believe that the measurement was right, and it would be.

In no time at all, he pronounced he would have to cut one leg down by half an inch. Obviously, on hearing this, I questioned his competence, and asked him to follow the well-known carpenters’ rule of “measure twice and cut once”, and take a second measurement. He flatly refused to do so, since, as he said, “you have had your measurement, it would call into question my right and competence to ply my trade if I let you have a second measurement”. Furthermore, he said, if it all went wrong It would be my own fault for not having sufficient faith in him and his magic tape measure.

Quite unsurprisingly, my table is now ruined, all because I believed an absolute charlatan who had no intention of listening to reason, or believed he could ever do wrong.

He is now off spending his ill-gotten gains down at Conservative club bar, where no doubt, he is telling everyone stupid enough to listen to him, what a clever chap he really is, and how it was all my fault, because I did not have enough faith in him and his magic tape measure.

If you support the governments’ position that it would be unconstitutional to have a second referendum (actually the first based on the actual provable facts), then just think of my kitchen table, and who knows, you might just think again.

David Curran
Feltham

The battle of Brexit

Am I alone in noticing that the suggested date for an election, 14 October, is the anniversary of the Battle of Hastings. Is this coincidence or is Boris going to hijack English history by recasting the battle as England versus Europe.

Francis Beswick
Stretford

Unelected bureaucrats

Your newspaper is full of the chaos that is current politics and you give much of the credit for it to Dominic Cummings, the eminence grise in Downing Street. It is therefore an unelected bureaucrat who seems to be dictating what should happen next in the Brexit process. Reminds me of one of the key reasons put forward to leave the EU. Unelected bureaucrats?

Oh! The irony.

Christopher Bratt
Arnside

Johnson’s Brexit bluff

Boris Johnson tells us he wants a deal with the EU. I believe he is lying, that he wants a hard Brexit and knows it will be catastrophic in the medium term, but he wants to shift the blame for this onto “traitors within” and Remainers, who are “undermining” his negotiating position, and, of course, onto the intransigence of the EU. My reasons for thinking this? The ministers and advisers he has appointed, his slow start in contacting either Ireland or the EU, in contrast to his early contact with Donald Trump, his insistence that the backstop must go, which he knows the EU cannot accept, and his failure to come up with any new ideas for a compromise on this, along, of course, with his excellent track record when it comes to deceit and untruths. We must not fall for this.

Adrian Cosker
Hitchin

Food shortages

Tom Peck (“Get Ready for Brexit’! It starts with the suspension of the rule of law and the expulsion of the sane” Tuesday 2 September) reminds us that Michael Gove said “everyone will get the food they need” after a no-deal Brexit. Notice it is not the food they want. So he is saying we will have enough food to stay alive but no more. Bread and scrape it is then.

Alan Pack
Canterbury

Eyes Wide Shut 20 years on

Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut did a great job of deromanticising the boring and extravagant lives of the uber-rich. Nothing about it made me envy any of the characters, which was my takeaway of its central theme, as well as its importance. (Wasn’t there a subplot of a man goading his daughter into sex work? Something which many stage moms subject their hopeful progeny to by proxy?)

Kenney C Kennedy
Shreveport (USA)