Near the school where I had my first teaching post there was a council estate that specialised in housing big families (Living large, G2, 26 August), sometimes in two four-bedroom houses knocked together. If you were on your way to the fish and chip shop and saw a child from one of these families in front of you, you’d hurry to get ahead. Their order would be for 17 lots of chips and two fish cakes.
Gillian MacIntosh
Ilkley, West Yorkshire
• So Charles Clarke reckons Jeremy Corbyn is the “continuity Benn/nutter candidate” (Corbyn pledges to sort out PFI ‘mess’ in NHS, 27 August). Is this the same Charles Clarke who took a leading role with his Cambridge colleague Mike Gapes in setting up clause IV in the mid-1970s to support the ideas of Tony Benn against the predations of Militant?
Bill Sheppard
Sheffield
• Tom Sutcliffe (My vision of the future: no more ‘vision thing’, 24 August) reminds me of a colleague’s comment when the local authority where I worked was undergoing yet another reorganisation: “The gap between vision and nightmare is a narrow one.”
Peter Clegg
Sheffield
• A fine top 10 listing of Gil Scott-Heron’s finest moments (The revolution lives on, G2, 26 August). But how could you not include Whitey On the Moon, a razor-sharp summation of the social/political status of black people in America which rings just as true today?
Graeme Hartley
London
• The normally slick George Osborne has missed a trick. Surely he should have said China’s finance crash (Report, 25 August) is “the fault of the last Labour government” and that his response to it is “part of our long-term economic plan”?
Robin Wendt
Chester
