Starmer isn’t attacking Sunak – he’s highlighting an important issue

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

The non-dom tax status protects some of the top 1 per cent of earners in the UK (PA Wire)

I don’t believe for one minute that Sir Keir Starmer deliberately targeted Rishi Sunak’s wife over her former non-dom tax status.

What I believe Sir Keir Starmer has been and is doing is highlighting the issues with non-dom tax status. Let’s not forget that non-dom tax status protects some of the top 1 per cent of earners in the UK.

However, what the non-dom tax status does more than anything else is prevent funding for frontline public services designed to protect the most vulnerable in society.

People like those on NHS waiting lists who will ultimately benefit from Labour using funds made up from scrapping the non-dom tax status, in order to train a new generation of doctors and nurses.

Geoffrey Brooking

Hampshire

Years of Tory waste have left us hopeless

Jeremy Hunt’s farcical budget nonsense is now unraveling. Inflation has gone up, the economy flatlined and we have zero growth.

Hopeless, they’ve just heaped more pressure on working families as additional taxes and costs kick in as a consequence of continued Tory policy failure.

More than a decade of Tory waste!

Dale Hughes

Address Supplied

The pay of junior doctors is simply not fair

Lord Bethel and others who have failed to look at relevant facts claim that junior doctors “earn a fortune”. Not till they get much higher up the tree, they don’t!

Saddling junior doctors with university debt and then paying them as little as £14 per hour (which is how £29,000 works out, assuming an unlikely 40 hours per week) is simply not fair. No wonder many decide it’s not tenable, whatever ideals they had to begin with.

Helen Watson

Henley on Thames

Haven’t we had enough chaos already?

Steve Mackinder, in his recent letter to The Independent, is wondering which “nasty party”, Labour or Conservative, to vote for.

In general elections, we voters have been stitched up by those two parties for over a century now. They have, in effect, colluded in their support of our undemocratic first-past-the-post voting system, so that it’s highly likely that one or other of the parties will have a parliamentary majority despite not having anything close to a majority of votes.

Perhaps they would both learn a lesson if we all voted for anyone but a Labour or Conservative candidate – there are always other reasonable options.

The commonly expressed fear is that a hung parliament would result in chaos.

But don’t we have chaos already?

Susan Alexander

South Gloucestershire

Knee-jerk legislation is no way to run a country

Sunshine has many positive aspects, but Daniel Green has failed to shine the light as clearly as he should. Tenants slapping solar all over our commercial roofs is not the way to go.

Firstly, who takes responsibility for the roof structure and waterproofing? Who pays when roof repairs are needed? Most buildings have multiple tenants, and I can tell you that very few wish to pay for solar that they must leave in place when they depart. The landlord is likely to bill them for dilapidations too.

The answer is legislation, yes, but not empowering tenants who have no liability for their actions. A roof needs repair and refurbishment before it is covered with solar PV or PV-T. Insulation should be brought up to standard before too – and that is carbon-zero standard, not current regulations.

This is another area where our government is decades behind in its legislation and policies. Knee-jerk legislation is no way to run a country.

Michael Mann

Shrewsbury