Readers' letters - May 22

I have no loyalty to any political party and would always vote for the issues that is best for me, my family and the country, and that includes rights for employees to be balanced with employers’ right to balance their books.

Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May are the epitome of these dogmas and we end up paying for them and always have. The Lib Dems are just remoaners, full of hot air and want us back in Europe.

We do need change but it should not come from each party doing their best to undo the other’s policies.

The NHS is being privatised by stealth and the British public must bear in mind that voting Conservative will end the NHS, regardless of the spin. Our national health is no longer national, it is international for those that have no entitlement to have free access to it and the pittance the NHS recovers from them is a factor in the lack of funds.

Labour may promote themselves as the party to save the NHS but what is not realised is that this will be the onset of many more of the not-entitled-to-free-treatment accessing the NHS, along with an open door to social security and benefits that comes with far left ideals.

Education and hard work should be rewarded without the fear that some idealist is intent on taking most of it from them while the same ideal would reward those that could not be bothered about education or working hard, but just use the benefits system to spend on booze, fags or the betting shop rather than bettering the lives of their children.

The left wing will always see them as needy and vulnerable and have no system to filter out those that are actually needy and vulnerable.

I am for Brexit as I want my country to be run by us not Brussels and to end the free movement of people into the UK from Europe.

Those that have come, if they have a job they should apply for a work permit and they should be allowed to stay.

RG

via email

We want our country back

The slogan ‘We want our country back’ will be a huge theme of the upcoming general election.

We want our country back from the foreign companies who now run our railways and take the profits overseas.

We want our country back from the multinational companies who trade here but pay little tax and pocket all the profits. We want our country back from the tax cheats and overpaid fat cats who crashed our economy and who reward themselves for failure.

We want our country back from the foreign press moguls who tell us how to vote and twist the news.

We want our country back from the private companies who leech off the health service.

It will be Labour, not the Conservatives and President May, who I trust to give me back the country I served.

Mr D Smith

Address supplied

Publish a Poor List instead

That annual celebration of greed, the Sunday Times Rich List, has recently been published. Instead of staring at the 1,000 wealthiest, we should be thinking of the poorest 14 million.

That is how many Britons are living in poverty today, according to a study by the Institute of Fiscal Studies and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. It might take a while to compile an alternative not-so-rich list, but we’d better hurry up and start, because the Parliament that we are about to elect will add another million and a half by the time its allotted five years are up, on top of the million already added since 2010 (before then, poverty was in decline).

The great majority of the poor are in working households – so much for making work pay. Worse still, children living in poverty make up over half of the expected increase.

The Government’s welfare reforms will make their own large and unpleasant contribution of half a million to these totals.

It is no coincidence that, of the 100 billionaires who top that Sunday Times list, 28 are Conservative donors.

They’ve seen inequality increase, and they’d like more of the same, please.

All of us, and our families and friends around the country, need to consider this bleak picture when we once more troop to the ballot box in June.

J Robin Hughes

via email