If we’re sending MPs to the jungle, why stop at Matt Hancock?

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

Might I therefore suggest we ship the whole lot of this Tory government over there to join him (Reuters)

Matt Hancock thinks he can serve his constituents better from “the jungle” rather than from the “ivory towers of Westminster”.

Might I therefore suggest we ship the whole lot of this Tory government over there to join him, where they can also better serve the public and dine out on a whole range of exotic animal anatomy – but obviously at subsidised prices.

G Forward

Stirling

Safe routes

In answer to Alistair Duncan in your Letters page, the fairly obvious solution to stopping the “illegal” channel crossings is to create more safe and “legal” routes, and also allow migrants to work. Germany did this with Syrian refugees.

We currently have a severe shortage of skilled and unskilled workers. If migrants were allowed to work, this may help to change public attitudes, as some still see migrants as “spongers”.

Martin Heaton

Cheshire

Where is our moral compass?

I would imagine the world is looking askance at the hostile performance of this latest home secretary, and rightly wondering when and where did Britain lose its moral compass?

Talk of “invasions” might place a tasty morsel in right-wing mouths, but should be discredited immediately. I sometimes wonder if Britain was being occupied by a hostile force, whether we would have the guts, stamina and sheer determination to seek for a place of refuge?

I might be wrong, but I suspect that we would all just sit on our backsides and moan interminably to anyone who would listen. Asylum seekers have so much offer a country that does indeed save them and this could be a win-win situation, instead of a nasty, long-winded affair where genuine claimants languish in the hinterland of a supposedly modern-facing and equitable country.

The government should walk in their downtrodden shoes for a change and see how they like it and do all that is required to remedy it.

Judith A Daniels

Great Yarmouth

NHS privatisation by stealth

Thank you for publishing the plain-speaking analysis of our NHS by Dr Kath Fielder GP. So rarely do we patients, who have spent years fighting against privatisation, see it written about in clear terms.

The lies told us by our MPs, denying any intention of NHS privatisation are a disgrace and they should face consequences for such mendacity.

J M Joy

Address supplied

Sunak has no mandate

With reference to today’s editorial, things do not look good for Rishi Sunak. The cream and jam of the discredited cakeist philosophies of Johnson and Truss soil his Henry Herbert suit and Prada shoes; and the stains are stubborn.

The "optimistic, boosterish, expansionist Conservative manifesto presented to the British people by Mr Johnson in 2019" has been proven, by the inability of successive governments to implement it, to be impractical. This manifesto represents, if only in part, an assemblage of Johnson’s fantasy confections. His garden bridges, water cannons, tunnels to Ireland, the easiest trade deals in the world, no border in the Irish sea, the painful punchbag that is Brexit – the list goes on.

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Rishi Sunak will be obliged to bin many of the Tory party manifesto policies, and in doing so, will also consign the mandate that the 2019 victory provided to the garbage.

Sunak himself is now undertaking a reversal of the policies that he presented to the shallow puddle of a Tory party electorate in a failed election bid that were, by default, adopted by MPs without revisiting even that tiny constituency. He cannot make a claim to their mandate.

Having been a member of a Tory party that, for the last 12 years, has swung successive wrecking balls through the UK economy, from the continuing disaster of Brexit to Kwasi Kwarteng’s home-wrecking "fiscal event", his best defence in PMQs was that Tony Blair was to blame.

The Tory party has no mandate. Rishi Sunak has no mandate. The country cannot vote to either approve of or remove them without their own say so. Anyone for a very large slice of constitutional-change cake?

David Nelmes 

Newport