The government’s broken manifesto promise on the care-cost cap is stunning both in its audacity and in its blatant inconsistency with the huge rise in the threshold for inheritance tax which was brought in amid talk of the “natural” wish to pass one’s assets to one’s children.
Is it too much to hope that this deceit will nudge the sleepwalking electorate towards a belated understanding of the Tories’ overarching intention? Of course many of us have known since 2010 that they wish drastically to reduce the size, cost and reach of state provision, simply because they and their friends, relatives and peers have no need of it and don’t want to pay for it.
Unfortunately, a large enough section of the electorate believed enough of the vicious nonsense they were fed by the rightwing press to install the most extreme government of my lifetime. I would rather that people begin, again, to vote not just out of self-interest but out of a desire for social justice. My best hope now, however, is that many recent Tory voters will think again once they realise that it is not just those who have been portrayed as scrounging and feckless whose lives are going to be turned upside down by Cameron and Osborne.
Jane Duffield-Bish
Norwich
Capped or uncapped, the costs of caring for old people will keep growing. As someone who already depends on medical treatment – I’ve not dared ask the cost of drugs and tests – I feel very lucky, but also that it’s time for us all to question the rights and duties of prolonging life.
Do we all have a right or duty to live for as long as professional care can keep us going, at whatever the cost to ourselves and others?
There can be no one-fits-all set of answers but I want to be free to bow out – with consent and help of family, doctors and close friends – if I find my life is not worth living.
This is not just a local, professional or family issue but one that resonates around the world. Unrestrained population growth, deepening inequality and climate change are inextricably linked, existential threats to us all.
The rights and duties of prolonging life must become as open to question as the rights and duties of beginning it; voluntary death control as normal and natural as birth control.
Greg Wilkinson
Swansea
Take action on private rentals
With so much pressure on housing today shouldn’t we be looking at eliminating some of the serious flaws in our private rental sector? It seems to have deteriorated into a system whereby the haves bleed the have-nots while society looks on approvingly. Rent, for example, is set according to the “market”, but what that really means is the highest amount that can be extracted from the tenant. Surely the whole business of owning another person’s home and regarding it primarily as a financial investment is unethical. A home is a fundamental need.
Then there is the buy-to-let mortgage, which is a ruse whereby the tenant pays off the majority of the loan but finishes up with nothing – legitimised theft, no less. Rather than interfere with our council housing and housing associations the government would help many more people by emulating those organisations and sweeping private rented properties into similar regulated management companies.
Derek Dod
Southsea
Corbyn is a return to decency
I feel quite incensed that your commentators simply can’t grasp what is happening with Labour and the electorate (“Labour downs a deadly cocktail of fatalism, fury and fantasy”, Comment). People are no longer buying into rhetoric based on putting the interests of the markets, the banks and the multinational corporations first. They are seeing and experiencing first hand the effect of this and it is disabusing them of the beliefs sold to them by the rightwing press and many who claim to be Labour. They are seeing sense about what now needs to be done to retrieve a society where ordinary people’s interests come first. A seismic shift is underway and Corbyn is making the first waves of this visible. It’s not a heart transplant that people want – it’s a return to the values of the heart.
Mora McIntyre
Hove
Stop this America’s Cup hype
The Camber Docks, Portsmouth, the subject of Jamie Doward’s article on the America’s Cup (Sport), has been the working home of Portsmouth’s fishing fleet, its market and wholesalers, since 1180. The new BAR building is totally out of character with this and the rest of Old Portsmouth and is more eyesore than eye-catching. A fish merchant’s established there for 40 years, with its fishing boats moored alongside, has been forced to relocate to an industrial unit several miles inland to make way for this HQ. The notion that we are all desperately awaiting an America’s Cup win is pure jingoistic hype, typical of modern sport. Most people know little of this “sport” for billionaire boys and their multimillion pound toys, with its complex and ever-changing rules, and care even less. The fact that the last day of racing was cancelled by weather that would not have affected most yacht racing says it all.
Michael Ware
Portsmouth
