The CBI’s systematic scaremongering (Labour’s plan for state ownership of utilities to cost £196bn – CBI, 14 October) neglects the potential financial benefits of nationalisation. Public ownership of the railways could ensure that income is concentrated on improving services instead of being creamed off by private shareholders.
Francis Prideaux
London
• Could someone set out the process by which those of us who vote by post will hang on to our right to suffrage (Conservatives accused of suppressing voters’ rights with photo ID plans, 14 October)?
Steve Teasdale
Halifax, West Yorkshire
• When I was training for the priesthood, the vice-principal of our theological college regaled us with a story of his student days there. Apparently the German wife of a staff member had a very precise knowledge and use of the English language. He was somewhat surprised after breakfast one day to find a note in his pigeon hole inviting him to “afternoon tea”. She declared that she was so looking forward to meeting him again for intercourse (Letters, 14 October).
Rev Canon Robert McLean
Wylam, Northumberland
• I always thought it was a free Telegraph with a bottle of water, not vice versa (Telegraph scraps free water as profits plunge, 16 October).
Billy Morrison
Ayr
• Downing a large “blob” at each of the five Yates’s Wine Lodges (Letters, 17 October) within a circular sprint of Manchester’s once-great Withy Grove printing centre was a necessary initiation for newly engaged subeditors at the Daily Mirror in the 1970s. I made it, rubber-legged, back to my desk inside the designated hour; many didn’t.
David Banks
Daily Mirror editor, 1992-94
• Join the debate – email guardian.letters@theguardian.com
• Read more Guardian letters – click here to visit gu.com/letters
• Do you have a photo you’d like to share with Guardian readers? Click here to upload it and we’ll publish the best submissions in the letters spread of our print edition
