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It is thanks to the Conservatives’ incompetence that food prices are rising faster than any other G7 country

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

Thursday 17 August 2023 18:35 BST

Liz Truss caused the inflation spike in the first place (pixel8000)

The Independent’s recent editorial about the Conservatives, Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt’s attempt to claim credit for lowering inflation was spot on.

It was the Conservatives own economic incompetence under Liz Truss and her own ministers that caused the most recent inflation spike in the first place. It is the Conservatives’ incompetence that is costing the taxpayer £6 million a day in hotel bills for asylum seekers.

It is thanks to the Conservatives’ incompetence that food prices are rising faster here than any other G7 country. It is thanks to the Conservatives’ incompetence that energy giants are at the same time making record levels of profit, while the PM refuses to bring in a proper windfall tax. And it is thanks to the Conservatives’ incompetence that 1,121,483 households have been hit by the Tory mortgage bombshell.

Which is all the more reason for a government led by Sir Keir Starmer that will break down the barriers to opportunity and smash the class ceiling created by Tories looking after the richest one per cent at the expense of the rest.

Geoffrey Brooking

Havant

We have no right to turn our backs on migrants

It has often been said that, in a metaphorical sense, “the world is on fire”.

Now, there is even some literal truth in that. But more significantly, there are now huge population movements driven by war and the consequences of the climate crisis; with droughts, floods and extreme weather becoming more frequent, depriving people of their homes and livelihoods.

And when the victims of all this flee in our direction, there are those who believe that we can sit on our island, turn our backs, and not share in the inconvenience of all this – uttering truisms like “we just don’t have the room”.

How convenient it must be to forget that are all stuck on this planet and we are all in this together. One of the roles our politicians and governments are expected to provide is moral leadership but, unfortunately, here in the UK we seem to have sunk very low and instead have a government that appears to thrive on xenophobia.

Even before the consequences of climate change have been able to take hold, here in the UK we have seen the end of civilised society already!

Dennis Leachman

Kingston upon Thames

The UK and EU have to work together

I have a great deal of sympathy for the people trying to get into the UK, whether they are economic migrants seeking a better life or simply seeking safety. But at the same time I do recognise that the UK has the right to limit numbers and control its borders.

I am an immigrant myself and have lived in the UK a long time. I am well aware that we are all where we are because of accidents of birth. We have done nothing to influence it, and maybe if some people remembered that, there might be a bit more balance and compassion when thinking of solutions to the current crisis.

People like Suella Braverman and Priti Patel seem to forget that they too are simply one generation away from possibly being in the same position as the people they apparently despise. That might be blunt, but they genuinely do seem to deplore the notion of trying to migrate for a better life.

It is a very difficult situation though, and the UK needs to work closely with its European neighbours. Something that has become more difficult since... I won’t say it!

Saying that migrants should “f**k off back to France” is ignorant in so many ways, including a complete lack of understanding of the issue. France takes in more migrants than the UK, and they could push people back to Spain or Italy. And so on, and so on.

It can’t simply be that migrants have to stay in the first safe country they land in, as is often parroted by the anti-immigrant lobby here. That would mean that Spain, Greece, Italy etc would have to deal with all immigrants themselves, which clearly isn’t fair. There has to be a Europe-wide solution, and in the long run there has to be some way to make sure that life is good enough in home countries to ensure people want to stay there.

John Maxwell

Bournemouth

AI in education is not cheating

Just as calculators haven’t destroyed mental arithmetic, artificial intelligence (AI) won’t prevent students’ learning or development.

The calls for the government to step in to police the use of AI in schools is overblown. What teacher doesn’t use Google either to develop lesson plans or in their own personal life? The AI chatbots some students are using to help with homework are trained on the very same data sets teachers use. Using ChatGPT is in many ways no different from Googling the answer – a method of doing homework which has been around since the advent of the internet.

Framing the use of AI as inherently cheating or preventing students from learning “properly” is not how we should be looking at this trend. Further, to prevent the use of a tool that has already gained traction in the workplace is to deny students an opportunity to master the tools which will help them thrive in society.

In a recent pulse poll, 38 per cent of people said they believed further guidelines were needed around the use of AI in education. And I wholly agree. There is a big role government, industry bodies and EdTech companies must play to provide more guidance to teachers and school staff on how best to integrate AI into the education system.

This should start with showing teachers and support staff in schools how AI can be used to make their own jobs more efficient, so they can see the benefits of AI for themselves. This might involve some basic training on prompt writing, to demystify the process of how the tools actually work in practice. EdTech companies might also look at training AI models on textbooks, so the data is sanitised and checked for quality and adherence to the curriculum before it’s used by students and teachers.