Letters: No major party has succeeded in selling Britain to this first-time voter

SIR – As a university student and first-time voter, I am dismayed by the options at this general election.

Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens are in favour of high taxes, with focus on the wealthy. They are targeting success. The Conservatives have failed to deliver on their promises and are strongly disliked. The only other option is Reform UK, which is increasingly appealing, though our voting system will not reward it.

I fear a high-tax Labour government will cause an exodus of bright minds to countries with lower taxes, such as the United Arab Emirates and the United States. I must say, it’s tempting to flee.

Henry Bateson
Whittingham, Northumberland

SIR – In all my 80 years, I can’t remember such an uninspiring lot of politicians. I shall have to vote for the best of a bad bunch. I fear for my children and grandchildren.

Janette Francis
West Malling, Kent

SIR – Dee-dee Dobell (Letters, June 25) wants to know where her Conservative candidate comes from and what he did for a living. Me too. 

Our Conservative candidate is standing to replace our MP of 20 years, who felt sufficiently threatened not to stand again. I called our local Conservative office to point out what voters might want to know and what was missing from the leaflet we received. I was assured an “election address” would be arriving in the mail. It did – 10 days before election day – and failed to introduce the candidate.

Tricia Book
London N3

SIR – For the first time in 50 years as a Conservative supporter, I am astounded to note that I have not seen any blue Conservative signage anywhere in south Oxfordshire. 

Especially conspicuous by their absence are the large trailers normally placed by farmers in the fields. This must be a concrete sign of our agricultural sector’s disengagement from the Tory party.

Bill Readings
Benson, Oxfordshire

SIR – I question Madeline Grant’s predictions about Labour MPs (“Meet your new Labour MP. You won’t be impressed”, Comment, June 26). 

Our Labour candidate, Gen Kitchen, who was elected as our MP in a by-election in February, is young and energetic, with her feet firmly on the ground. Now 29, she has already had a successful career spanning the public, private and charity sectors, and served as a borough councillor. Thanks to her parents’ time in the Royal Navy, she is also knowledgeable about defence. 

She has engaged with charities and farmers in the constituency, mentioning several of the former in her maiden speech and earning approval from a number of the latter. What’s not to like?

Jimmy James
Wellingborough, Northamptonshire

England at the Euros

SIR – May I speak in defence of England’s performances at the Euros (Sport, June 26)? The play was not exhilarating, but we won the group, which was the main aim at this stage. To pick on certain players and the manager, Gareth Southgate, is self-defeating. However, I think that some key players need a bit of a rest. Half a match should do it.

One of the causes of the dismal scorelines so far is the fact that, if you come third in your group, you have a good chance of qualifying for the next stages. If only the top two teams qualified, we’d see more interesting matches. Of course, this would not generate as much money, which is more important to the organisers than lively football.

The knock-out stages will be far more entertaining.

Anne Langley
Wolverhampton

SIR – Like the Conservatives under Rishi Sunak, England under Gareth Southgate are clueless as to how to attack even the weakest opposition.

Chris Penney
Wellington, Somerset

Replacing the Lords

SIR – I agree to a great extent with John Sheridan Smith’s arguments for scrapping the House of Lords (Letters, June 25), but not for doing away with the second house altogether. 

The recent ruling of the Supreme Court against Surrey County Council – on the correct interpretation of the regulations for assessment of development projects before awarding planning permission – shows that, in complex matters, the laws passed by Parliament can have effects beyond those that were perhaps intended. From that example, it appears that the body that pronounces finally on the exact effects of legislation is the judiciary – respectable, worthy, but unelected, unaccountable to the public or government or business. 

In France the second house, the Senate, is elected not by the public or by the government, but by the people who will have to administer the laws – the equivalent of town and county councils, which tend to elect former administrators who know what’s wanted. At 348 members, it is far smaller than the 785-strong House of Lords, and its major brief is to ensure that the final law is practicable in addition to being well-delineated. A senator holds that position for five years before needing re-election – unlike a Lord. 

The system isn’t perfect but it’s a better solution than appointing friends of the government to the House of Lords or abolishing the second chamber altogether.

Sylvia Aiano
Rennes, Ille et Vilaine, France

Raging gull

SIR – On the very day of Judith Woods’s article (“Seagulls are terrorising the UK – and nobody dares stop them”, Comment, June 24), my cleaning lady came in bloody but unbowed from an encounter with a seagull. 

On a hot day she had left her back door open, and, on coming downstairs, was aware of a frightful kerfuffle in her front room. A seagull was trapped in there, having come through the kitchen, devoured the cat’s food and the contents on the kitchen table, and terrified her cat. She wrestled with the bird and managed to get it out of the window. She then had to clean up the mess the bird had left behind.

I don’t know what I would have done in similar circumstances. Being 90, my combat days are long gone. 

James W Mitchell
Thornton Cleveleys, Lancashire

Convenience fees

SIR – Mark Evans’s entertaining letter (June 25) about a parking app charging a convenience fee highlights the mere tip of what will become a very large iceberg in the coming years.

The rush to get rid of cash and replace it with cards, mandatorily in some places, can be seen as convenient, and indeed will be so until the card companies begin to impose “transaction” or “convenience” charges. 

What seems trivial initially will build until significant sums are being taken from people’s accounts annually.

Tim Rann
Mirfield, West Yorkshire

SIR – Despite golf courses discouraging the use of mobile phones during a round, several now require players to sign up to an app in order to learn the precise location of the pin at each hole.

Presumably greenkeepers have developed an aversion to changing the colour or height of flags on the green, which seemed to serve as a perfectly reasonable target, given that most golfers do not have exact control of the distance of each shot.

Readers might be aware of other unnecessary apps.

Robert Barlow
Pulborough, West Sussex

Hectored on the Tube

SIR – Melanie McDonagh (Comment, June 24) describes some of the posters in the London Underground that lecture and threaten passengers.

Throughout the 1960s, I travelled extensively on the Tube, when I could quietly read or tackle the Telegraph crossword, occasionally looking up to be amused by the advertisements such as those for Guinness.

Now it’s difficult to sit reading or crossword-solving because of incessant announcements, and there are certainly no amusing advertisements. I’m even wary to look up for fear of being accused of staring, particularly as I tend to gaze into space when thinking about crossword clues.

Tony Manning
Barton-on-Sea, Hampshire

Silent summer

SIR – I have also noticed an almost total absence of bees and other insects (Letters, June 24). 

The hedge of nepeta in our garden is usually humming at this time of year, but this June there’s a horrible silence. There are fewer house martins nesting in the eaves, too.

Rona Knight
Watlington, Oxfordshire

From farm hand to friend: the journey of a PoW

SIR – My father was a dispatch rider in France, Holland and eventually Germany, where he finished his war at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp during the liberation, which changed his whole view on life forever.

In 1946 he returned to the farm at Stelling Minnis in Kent, which he had worked on prior to the war. There he befriended a German prisoner of war (Letters, June 26), who was labouring in the fields. Before he was returned to his own country a couple of years later, my father appointed him as one of my sister’s godparents. How about that for reconciliation?

Reginald Hoare
Canterbury, Kent

SIR – A relative of my mother ran a mixed farm near Stocksfield in Northumberland.

During the war she had a variety of PoWs help on the farm, including Italians and Germans. One was a German named Karl. He had been a professional sailor and then a conscripted chief engineer on a U-boat. He was apparently most useful, turning his hand to any farm work, but was especially good at repairing farm machinery. In fact some local farmers asked him to do such repairs and even acquired a lathe for him to use to make machinery parts.

As an eight-year-old evacuee to Stocksfield, I often met Karl at the farm. He was friendly and kind, and encouraged me to work hard at school. He had a wife and family in Hamburg. He was repatriated in 1946, but sadly found that all his family had been killed by bombing. 

He applied to return to Stocksfield, and he and my aunt eventually married and ran the farm together. Both are buried in the nearby churchyard.

John Urwin
Castle Douglas, Kirkcudbrightshire

SIR – As a toddler at the end of the Second World War, my child’s seat on the back of my mother’s bicycle was beautifully crafted from wicker by Italian PoWs in what is now Cambridgeshire. 

The seat no longer exists but I still have the wicker rattle they made for me when I was a baby.

G M Wootten
Darlington, Co Durham

SIR – My late father-in-law was sent by a concerned commander of a PoW camp to go and check on the Italians, who had not been turning up for meals. 

On the far side of the camp, next to the woods, he found them, happily clustered around a bubbling pot of food, which they offered to share. It turned out to be an excellent rabbit stew. The only concern: there were no rabbits inside the camp, but there were lots on the other side of the fence. 

He concluded that the Italians were content to enjoy British hospitality – but drew the line at our food.

Deborah Tompkinson
Maidenhead, Berkshire

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