Is asking a simple question really breaking the ministerial code?

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In her situation, being a minister with a security detail, I thought that Braverman’s approach was quite sensible (PA)

It is amazing how things change over the years. When I lived in England in the Sixties, Seventies, Eighties and Nineties, it was neither illegal, immoral, nor unethical to ask a simple question. Not today, sad to say.

We have a situation where Suella Braverman, who happens to be the home secretary, was caught speeding. She was obliged to attend a speed awareness course as part of the punishment and she asked if she could attend the course privately. In her situation, being a minister with a security detail to protect her, I thought that this was quite sensible as it would avoid the security detail having to do security checks on the other attendees.

Keir Starmer and others of his ilk, including the media, deemed she had broken the ministerial code. How can this be possible as she had only asked a question? I find their behaviour dishonest and disloyal.

All this is an insult to the fair-minded British public, who are not as gullible as politicians seem to think they are. It will be shown at the next general election, despite the results of the recent local elections. The country and the world are going through a difficult spell at this moment in time, and distractions such as this are, in my view, very unpatriotic.

John Fair

Address Supplied

Please, please, please, please, please can we just have a general election?

How much longer do we have to endure the embarrassment of yet another (or in this case, the same) Tory minister breaking the ministerial code? Only to have the prime minister – who for some baffling reason gets to decide whether an inquiry is needed – decide: “No, we don’t need any investigation into obvious rule-breaking”.

Now we have the current Cabinet Office withholding information from the public inquiry into the Covid pandemic. We have the Tory right trying to blame civil servants for having the nerve to send requested documents to Baroness Hallett, the chair of the inquiry. Imagine, following the rules! How very left wing.

Let the Conservative Party go away and regroup. Sort out their squabbles. Decide what they stand for. Make some rules that they can actually follow and hopefully jettison those who use dog-whistle rhetoric.

We desperately need a government that will actually govern rather than what we have now: a party engaged in an endless stream of damage limitation exercises.

Karen Brittain

York

Healthcare providers would struggle with any cuts to migration

Today’s immigration figures must not prompt a knee-jerk reaction to cut back on the number of workers social care providers can recruit from overseas.

Reducing the number would be the worst thing the government could do right now. We have 165,000 staff vacancies, hampering our ability to provide proper care to hundreds of thousands of people. The staffing shortage, after the pandemic and the cost of living crisis, has led to care and nursing home closures and the loss of homecare provisions.

Many providers would struggle to operate properly if overseas recruitment is restricted, and it would mean further cuts in care provision.

Mike Padgham

York

Endless migration is not the answer

Judith A Daniels may well state she has no problem with immigration “as long as necessary public services can be kept up to speed with growing numbers”. And there’s the nub of our dilemma.

Does “up to speed” include the maintenance or reduction of the current 7.3 million people awaiting treatments on the NHS?

Rishi Sunak has revealed we have a record net immigration figure this year. Every single arrival will need a roof, food, and access to public services.

Living in the UK’s breadbasket both Judith and I can watch the farmland around us being swallowed up by the government’s housing targets desperately looking for space to build Norfolk’s share of those arrivals. This unavoidably means field after field is being lost to food production, which cannot be ignored.

A relentless influx is utterly unsustainable. While the nasty Tories are roundly pilloried for their “inhumane” treatment of asylum seekers I’d really like any one of the supporters of an endless open-door policy to suggest how dwindling UK-grown food supplies and infrastructure should be provided for this ever-growing number.

If we don’t stop it now, when exactly would be a good time to pull up the drawbridge? Just as the last acre of arable land is sold to a developer?

Many want to bury their heads in the sand and shy away from the unpalatable reality of uncontrolled immigration, but the fact is that it will eventually overwhelm us.

Steve Mackinder

Denver