Readers' letters - August 11

So British Gas has put the price of gas and electricity up, despite the wholesale costs going down.

Nothing wrong in that, that is competition working.

It means who can charge the most and get away with it.

I remember as a young apprentice back in the late 1940s when the Labour Government of Clement Attlee was nationalising things.

All the working Tory men were saying it would not work because there would be no competition.

Well, you know now what competition is.

We have had the railways with sky-high fares and bad service.

More than 30 different companies are now running the trains.

The Government had to take over the East Coast Mainline a few years ago.

It was making millions for the country.

Then the great George Gideon Osborne de-nationalised it.

Virgin Trains made a profit while the country borrowed money.

Now we have European state railways milking our train services and sending all the profit to Europe.

It’s no wonder Jeremy Corbyn jumped on the nationalisation band wagon before the last election.

M Thompson

via email

Credit-fuelled fantasy world

Lib Dem leader Vince Cable thinks he knows better than everyone else, just like the young generation always think they know better than the older generation. Unfortunately, politicians never grow up.

Brexit would not have happened if it wasn’t for the mindless dogma of uncontrolled immigration. He and the young generation are living in a dreamworld if they think it’s not a problem for Britain to take in a million people every three or four years.

Freedom of movement may be the right ideal in an ideal world where there is no economic reason for people to migrate from one country to another in large numbers, but that world does not exist, and that economic situation has not been created.

Create the situation first or don’t put first things first and create chaos.

The young have not been “comprehensively shafted”, as Cable describes it, by older Brexit voters.

The young generation were left a legacy of debt, unaffordable housing and an old-world capitalist economy on the verge of collapse by a generation of politicians who led us into this mess while we were in the EU.

And no lessons have been learned.

The main causes of the global financial crisis have been swept under the carpet.

Politicians have been allowed to play politics with the financial crisis and blame government spending, using the public sector as a scapegoat, while the disastrous finance industry has been allowed to carry on business as usual, creating money out of thin air as well as complex financial games, mechanisms and derivatives which hide risk, toxic debt and balance sheets.

It’s still a credit-fuelled fantasy world.

Gordon Sanderson

via email

Austerity’s a political choice

Since 2010, the Tories have reduced pensioners’ heating allowance, scrapped the £25 per week to 16- to 18-year-olds who stayed on at school, slashed ESA by £30 and introduced the bedroom tax.

Austerity is a political choice to attack the poor and at the same time the Tories are increasing our national debt by over £5,000 a second.

S Ellis

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