Jonathan Freedland is surely right (This pre-election jockeying is threatening the union, 31 January). But there is something else going on in this election cycle besides backbiting among the nations. The six-week period of campaigning, long admired in the US for its short duration, is also a prominent casualty, killed by the fixed-term parliament and aided and abetted by the media (including this paper). The political parties, though, are not accustomed to the sheer space-time continuum they now have to fill. How intelligently they do that will tell us, come the election itself, whether a six-month or a six-week campaign is better for the health of our democracy.
John Pierson
Malpas, Cheshire
• It’s combinations we’re interested in for possible coalition governments, not permutations as Jonathan Freedland says. In the former we don’t care what order the political parties are in; in the latter the order does matter.
Dr Alex May
Manchester
