Theresa May’s “loss of support, particularly among younger voters” (Report, 30 September) is an imprecise phrase. The Conservatives lost the support of the young long ago, except for those privileged young professionals in banking, financial trading or high-end IT. This pattern of the privileged male elite in the Tory party pulling the strings from behind and frustrating May’s attempts to modernise the party, placing blame on the current leader, is as outdated as feudalism, aristocracy and the class system. The party’s choice is to accept that the world has changed and the people who put them in power are starting to flex their muscles against self-serving politicians, or to implode. Yet another unpredictable, in this morass of Brexit, Trump, Europe, the Middle East and more.
Robert Sherman
Whitby, North Yorkshire
• The prime minister said in her speech at the Bank of England (Report, 28 September) that the young “haven’t seen the problems that can occur when you don’t believe in free markets and sound management of the economy”. But the young are well aware of the risk society they are living in, even if they have yet to make the connection between those risks and the economic system giving rise to them. Eating disorders, an all-pervasive anxiety and a fear of failing in education, food banks, pollution, mental ill-health are some of the features of a failing system. The anxiety and neurosis many people experience – and not just the young – as if something is wrong with them is better understood as the changing nature of the institutional, public and professional environment that impairs people’s sense of self-respect and self-worth: changes brought about by the ubiquity of the global capitalist world in which we live and which, since the crisis of 2008, is showing a distinct pallor.
Richard Staines
Ipswich
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