A retirement age of 75 would stop pensioners like myself from living out my final years in good health

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Iain Duncan Smith’s Centre for Social Justice think tank claims that increasing the pension age to 75 is the responsible thing to do. But statistics from 2016 predicted that nearly 40 per cent of men wouldn’t see 75, and the average man was expecting to live to 79. With life expectancy falling for the first time this year, swathes of men could expect little or no time to enjoy their retirement.

I was six months over 65 when I retired and for the next decade played the near daily golf I had longed to do since I joined the work force. But in the years after 75 my mobility and length off the tee plummeted and I now need a buggy to play the links.

In the early 1960s I won a US sports scholarship and agree with the scribe who wrote “Californian college life in the years before Vietnam was as close to heaven on earth as we have come.” But golf in the first decade of retirement at 65 runs it close!

Dr John Cameron
St Andrews

Low pass grades are no bad thing

What is the problem with a grade boundary of 55 per cent for an A in Maths? I am sure I could set a paper where students of that calibre could only get 5 per cent, or equally one where they could get 100 per cent. But if we want to rank and distinguish students across the whole ability range, including separating those at the top end, then this may well be the right level. As a philosopher colleague of mine once said in a similar context, “There is no platonic 60 per cent”.

Rachael Padman
University of Cambridge

Sinn Féin: rethink your abstentionism

We all know that UK politics is gridlocked and the Northern Ireland Assembly is suspended. But how to resolve both of these urgent issues?

It might seem fanciful, but what if Sinn Féin were to unconditionally return to the Northern Ireland Assembly while at the same time starting an open review within the party around the policy of not taking up their seats at Westminster?

I understand that the policy of abstentionism goes back to the creation of Sinn Féin early in the 20th century and applied equally to Westminster and Dáil Éireann, right up to 1986 when Sinn Féin held a conference that led to a revision of the policy and they took up their seats in the Dáil.

If policy could change in the Republic why not in the UK? If this were to happen not only would Sinn Féin gain the moral high ground in re-establishing local political control but it would also cause a seismic change to the UK political landscape; undermining the Conservative/DUP pact, putting Brexit in doubt and giving Ireland a say in the future of the Union, one of the reasons Sinn Féin was created in the first place.

John Simpson
Ross on Wye

How can ministers deny no deal would be a catastrophe?

No matter what evidence is presented to government ministers that a no-deal Brexit would be catastrophic for Britain, it is always dismissed out of hand. They seem to be suffering from the same mindset as those who, centuries ago, despite scientific proof to the contrary, not only stuck to their belief that the world was orbited by the sun but persecuted those who disagreed with them.

Roger Hinds
Surrey

History repeats itself in polarised times

Dr Richard House wrongly ascribes to me the advocacy of a centrist political party, when what I was actually arguing was that one sort of extremism always leads to an opposite one, and neither actually does us any good. Dr House’s own prognosis appears to accept that the present state of belligerent political behaviour must simply carry on, and it is precisely that prospect which I tried to address.

My own leanings are, in fact, left of centre, but not to an extent which could be called extremist. This might be because as a very old man – my formative years were during the Second World War and its aftermath – I learned long ago that the social and economic consequences of reactionary upheaval, inevitably provoked by political failure, are far worse than a more moderate pace of change would provide. Examples in many parts of the world demonstrate this. Right now we are seeing a renaissance of narrow-minded right-wing political thought and action even in those countries which suffered, and should have learned most, from their terrible experiences under Nazism in the Second World War and later under communism in eastern Europe.

I sympathise with Dr House’s view of “Bullingdon Boris” as I can’t think of a single worthwhile thing he’s done to earn the premiership, and the mere fact that he could become PM on the basis of a few paid-up relics in the Tory party tells us all we need to know about the future under his “leadership”. The thought of his courtship with Donald Trump should fill us all with dread.

But I am also cautious about the likely turn of events should a Corbyn government, strongly influenced by the Momentum group, introduce the many changes – needed with varying degrees of urgency – too quickly for our people to absorb without the turbulence so easy to envisage should previous patterns be repeated.

Vic Gaunt
Bolton

Where is Project Hope?

Every time information reaches the public domain about the negative effects of Brexit, even including recent official government documents about the potential catastrophic consequences of no deal, the “do-or-die” Leavers angrily claim that it’s all just part of Project Fear.

My question is, where is Project Hope, and when do we see the hard evidence that tells us how much better our country will be when we are no longer in the EU?

Dr Peter Kirkbride​
West Yorkshire