Letters: Without a plan for growth, Britain is at risk of becoming a poor country

SIR – For many years we have believed that we live in a rich country – one that can afford top-class services such as the NHS, social support and good roads, railways and other infrastructure, and can buy whatever food it needs from abroad rather than growing it.

Sadly this is no longer the case. Britain does not generate enough wealth to support its needs, and has been borrowing ever more to make up the shortfall. Unless we make a fundamental change and start to grow our economy, we will not be able to afford the things we think we are entitled to.

Peter Knowles
Leigh-on-Sea, Essex

SIR – When will the Chancellor and Prime Minister remember that taxation discourages whatever it falls on, and that, in many cases, raising tax rates leads to lower overall receipts?

To misquote Neil Kinnock, we have ended in the grotesque chaos of a Conservative government – a Conservative government – scuttling around raising corporation tax at precisely the moment it should be lowering it in order to encourage businesses to set up and invest in our economy.

Nick Green
London SW6

SIR – Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, in her article on Emmanuel Macron’s political fortunes (Comment, February 21), describes France as “a country polarised, overtaxed, smothered in debt, its infrastructure, school system and health service threadbare, [and] incapable of slowing down unwanted immigration”.

This sounds familiar.

Alistair Hankey
Tring, Hertfordshire

SIR – Your Leading Article (“Scrap the rise in corporation tax”, February 23) rightly notes that (international) investors study league tables that refer to the level of corporation tax. The impact of corporation tax on the economy works through business investments. For business investments to strengthen, we need an improvement in the quality of governance (where Britain does worse than its competitors based on World Bank data) and less economic policy uncertainty (which can be achieved in large part through settling the Northern Ireland Protocol issue).

Corporate taxes are much less important, not least because Britain’s tax rate, currently at 19 per cent, is four percentage points lower than the OECD average without an obvious boost to our business investment growth.

Professor Costas Milas
University of Liverpool

SIR – Can Sir Keir Starmer reconcile his statement that business has nothing to fear from Labour (report, February 23) with his plans to withdraw charitable status from independent schools – or was he just seeking another headline?

Jonathan Mann
Gunnislake, Cornwall

Brexit and the Lords

SIR – Peers have raised concerns about the Retained EU Law Bill (Letters, February 23), which has returned to Parliament.

The House of Lords opposed Brexit and opposes every attempt to implement it. The Government, with its large majority, should be using the Parliament Act extensively to achieve what was set out in its manifesto.

Andrew Wauchope
London SE11

SIR – The peers’ letter warns against handing virtually unlimited powers to ministers without proper public scrutiny by Parliament.

Where were some of those voices when virtually unlimited powers were handed to the EU without any such scrutiny?

David Hutchinson
Nutley, East Sussex

Hopeless heat pumps

SIR – Matthew Lynn (telegraph.co.uk, February 22) is right: air source heat pumps are an awful product.

We have three, made by two different manufacturers. Our first one was installed in 2014, and I rue the day. They are top-of-the-range machines and had a corresponding price tag.

That they are expensive is well known, as is the fact that they only achieve a marginal efficiency improvement compared with gas. What is less well known – and should be shouted from rooftops – is that heat pumps are not mature technology. They keep breaking down – at least once a year and certainly when there is “extreme weather” (as the maintenance people call it; really this means any sub-zero temperature).

The pumps need to be serviced annually, at a cost of £400 each. This contract is more expensive than the equivalent for a gas boiler, and the price far outstrips the energy saving that the pumps are supposed to achieve. And then there are repair bills. Ours this year is particularly high at £5,000 – because, guess what, replacement parts aren’t cheap.

Toby Schumacher
Maplehurst, West Sussex

Scratchy script

SIR – Using an ink pen (Letters, February 23) was always a challenge for me. Mrs McCaig, my Year Three teacher, told me that my writing “looked like a chicken had walked over it before the ink had dried”.

Linda Waller
Hermitage, Berkshire

Kate Forbes’s beliefs

SIR – I am dismayed by the treatment in Scotland of Kate Forbes’s Christian faith (Comment, February 22).

Starting with Alastair Campbell’s “We don’t do God”, our country has moved from feeling embarrassed of Christian belief, via indifference and intolerance, to downright persecution.

Ms Forbes is being cancelled for being an honest politician.

Canon Keith Punshon
Dalton, North Yorkshire

SIR – How refreshing for a politician to give a straight answer to a question and state their personal beliefs.

I disagree with Kate Forbes’s politics, but it’s a shame she is being hounded for having such integrity – a quality most politicians appear to lack.

Jennifer Wagstaff
Tarves, Aberdeenshire

Palliative care access

SIR – Elizabeth Atherton’s tragic experience with her sister (Letters, February 22) has understandably coloured her views on assisted dying.

However, her belief that suffering persists despite the “best” palliative care has two difficulties. First, it has been estimated that nearly 120,000 people each year in Britain cannot access specialist palliative care. Second, recent evidence found that nearly 43 per cent of Dutch dying patients had at least one persistent symptom such as pain or agitation. This is despite their very liberal assisted dying laws and practice.

Ms Atherton’s solution of following the Oregon model incorrectly promotes the myth of stable practice. In reality, Oregon has steadily moved away from terminal illness to a wide range of non-terminal conditions, removed the reflection period for one in five patients, and experimented with four lethal drug cocktails in eight years without any patient safeguards.

Even the “best” assisted dying does not solve all the associated problems. The real scandal is the thousands of people each week who cannot access specialist palliative care.

Baroness Grey-Thompson (Crossbench)
London SW1
Rob George
Professor of Palliative Care, King’s College London
Amy Proffitt
President, Association for Palliative Medicine
Claud Regnard
Honorary Consultant in Palliative Care, St Oswald’s Hospice, Newcastle-upon-Tyne
Kevin Yuill
Emeritus Professor of History, University of Sunderland
CEO, Humanists Against Euthanasia

Bacon at its best

SIR – The best bacon sandwich (Letters, February 22) is on toasted white bread, with unsalted butter, homemade marmalade and a dash of English mustard.

Alexandra Elletson
Huish, Wiltshire

SIR – As a child, my mother’s favourite filling was “thunder and lightning” – a layer of thick cream spread with a generous amount of golden syrup.

Lulu Colliver
Stokenham, Devon

SIR – Rather than “sweet fillings in brown bread, savoury in white” (Letters, February 22), I divide my sandwiches between hot and cold fillings. While preferring wholemeal bread for cold sandwiches, for hot sausage, bacon, steak or fried egg it has to be white. The same goes for toasties.

Justice Hawkins
Kingscott, Devon

An underrated turn in a film ahead of its time

SIR – In light of Alexander Larman’s sensitive and sympathetic reflection on Bruce Willis’s career following his dementia diagnosis (Features, February 18), I feel there is one film in particular that demonstrates the actor’s considerable dramatic talent.

Willis starred alongside Tom Hanks and against type as Peter Fallow – a journalist investigating a racially charged high-society scandal – in the underrated 1990 film of The Bonfire of the Vanities.

While it was critically panned for its departures from the novel and it bombed in cinemas, in retrospect it was just ahead of its time, with its sharply pointed observation of the cynicism and hypocrisy of what would today be called wokeness. It features political activists exploiting and aggravating minority divisions to expand their own influence.

In the final scene, Fallow receives a Pulitzer Prize for finding out the truth of the tale. As he mounts the stage to collect his award, Willis’s voiceover considers whether Fallow had to sell his soul to achieve success. But then the journalist turns to the applauding audience and muses: “Well, there are compensations.” Willis’s ambiguous smile speaks volumes, and shows more subtlety and breadth than he is commonly credited with.

Robert Frazer
Salford, Lancashire

Dahl censorship is an affront to democracy

SIR – Freedom of expression seems to have gone into reverse. Those who testified against censorship at the Lady Chatterley’s Lover trial were writers and academics; now it is from academia that woke winds are blowing, and Penguin – the publisher that once defended freedom of expression, and the owner of Puffin Books – is censoring the works of Roald Dahl (Letters, February 21).

To call this an attempt to undermine democracy sounds extreme – but that is what it is. The Chatterley trial set literature against legislation that could be challenged. However, the rewriting of Dahl’s children’s stories is part of a pervasive movement to cut free speech, which no political party would dare contemplate in a democracy. Its significance cannot be overestimated.

Richard Lloyd-Jones
Eastbourne, East Sussex

SIR – Surely a publisher’s duty is to protect literature, not assume the role of a parent in protecting children (report, February 23).

Neil Harvey
London SW1

SIR – In 1956, my mother took me to see Macbeth at the Old Vic. As a child, I would have found it hard to follow if she hadn’t given me Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare (Letters, February 21) beforehand, then later the full play. My love of Shakespeare began there.

Jennifer Lane
Bowerhill, Wiltshire

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