Thanks to Polly Toynbee (May’s great deceit is that there is little left to share, 10 January) it is now quite clear that in Theresa May’s world if you are in work and “just managing” you may get some help. But if you are among the millions who through no fault of your own are not working because of illness or unemployment you will get no help because she consistently refuses to increase your benefit of just £73 a week (about a quarter of the minimum wage for a 40-hour week). These are the “not managing” people who have no place in Mrs May’s pantheon. So, 70 years on, ends the Beveridge aspiration for cradle-to-the-grave security. It seems that Mrs May’s vicarage upbringing has left her more than a little lacking in Christian compassion.
Robin Wendt
Chester
• How dare Theresa May waffle on about a “shared society” as if it were some benign, cooperative future? What the majority of UK citizens are sharing is the breakdown of all the public caring services which have been built up since the second world war. Never a day goes by without a cry from some sector, be it adult care, the NHS, education, fire service, police, libraries, children’s services about the strains – or even collapse – coming from lack of money. At the same time, we suffer from the pouring of about £205bn of public money into the insane Trident nuclear armed submarine project, which will never bring citizens anywhere peace and security.
Rae Street
Littleborough, Lancashire
• How dare Polly Toynbee write off gay marriage as “one minor totemic act, insignificant after Tony Blair’s civil partnerships”? When my long-term partner and I were finally allowed to marry in 2014 – a privilege that had been unthinkingly available to Ms Toynbee for all her adult life – I said in my wedding speech that bringing in equal marriage was the one and only act I would ever thank David Cameron for. It is the difference between real equality and second-class citizenship, between a human right and a halfway compromise.
The religious establishment Ms Toynbee has long set herself against and the “lazily sycophantic Tory commentariat” she excoriates in the very same article also wanted us to be happy with what we were given and stop shoving our existences down normal people’s throats. They were obsessed with what they regarded as our strange bedfellows: I don’t fancy hers much.
Adam Macqueen
St Leonards-on-Sea, East Sussex
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