Readers' letters - July 4

Let’s say you are Prime Minister.

You call a General Election to give yourself a clear mandate for Brexit.

You campaign in that election on giving the country strong Government. The result is your party gets a beating and your position is seriously weakened.

You now can only govern with the support of others.

You must use taxpayer’s money to bribe them, sorry, get their support.

You see your supporters and national esteem disappearing.

What would you do?

It has always been the Conservative Party’s historical raison d’etre to pursue, obtain and retain power at all costs.

If they have it, the opposition don’t, regardless of the needs of the Nation.

I want to warn the Conservative Party.

If your love of power is such that you allow Northern Ireland to fall back into its past, then you will be hated more and never forgiven; a past of civil unrest, violence, murder, bombings in mainland UK and parents fearing for their soldier sons and daughters sent to keep the peace.

To every Conservative MP, where is your personal integrity?

Your sense of shame?

Are you really going to put your party above your country?

Robert Reynolds

via email

Spendthrift incompetence

It has been reported that John McDonnell, the Shadow Chancellor, claimed the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire were ‘murdered by political decisions’ and that it happened as a consequence of austerity.

How can this possibly be true? It is illogical when the building had £8.6m spent on it for insulation and aesthetics purposes.

He would have more credibility as an opposition politician, if he had questioned the spending of £66,666 of taxpayers’ money on each flat.

I suspect the reason for the cladding was to help reduce our carbon emissions.

This is something he and all other MPs (apart from five) voted for under Ed Miliband’s 2008 Climate Change Act.

Even the current Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn did not vote against it. It is a pity he did not listen to his brother, a meteorologist, who has stated in the past that temperatures are not rising as claimed.

In effect, we have MPs trying to reduce our carbon dioxide emissions, when we produce less than two per cent globally, by spending £8.6m in an attempt to reduce household energy bills which have risen due to green subsidies.

Instead of trying to save the planet, our MPs should be giving priority to the social care funding crisis. Some MPs have complained about the brevity of the Queen’s speech which covers the work to be undertaken over the next two years. As far as I am concerned this is a good thing, because it reduces the damage they can do.

It is nonsense to accuse anyone of murder over the Grenfell fire, but spendthrift incompetence is a factor, as only fools would spend this amount of money for so little benefit, especially when times are hard.

Alan Machin

Address supplied

Scandal of Grenfell fire

The Grenfell tower block fire is a scandal.

A home must contain fire-resistant sofas, chairs, mattresses and loft insulation but can be wrapped in a highly flammable material!

Where did the safety assessment go wrong?

Will those accountable ever be found?

Dr Charles Baylis

via email