LETTERS
Money is not cheap
MARK CARNEY states he has been ‘in and around finance’ in the public and private sectors for three decades or more (Mail).
Doesn’t this, by very definition, make him part of the problem and not part of the solution?
He panders to only half of the electorate, offering cheap money, putting everyone in debt and keeping houses prices high. Cheap money cheapens us all.
RAYMOND RICHMOND, Coventry. MILLIONS of jobs will be lost to robots, says Mark Carney (Mail).
Let’s hope one replaces the Governor of the Bank of England, saving the taxpayer a fortune in the human encumbent’s salary and gold-plated pension. And we may even get a sensible forecast.
P. MINALL, Leverington, Cambs. ROBOTS are going to take over our jobs? Remember when we were told that computers were going to eliminate paperwork?
MIKE SIMPSON, Sheffield, S. Yorks.
Cheque mate
AFTER it was discovered a wife had been using her husband’s chequebook for a year, unnoticed by Lloyds (Mail), the bank refunded the husband. I assume the wife then refunded the bank.
Surely it’s time people took some responsibility for their own actions
RAY LINTOTT, Horsham, W. Sussex. I WORKED for one of the big five clearing banks in the Nineties. Even then clerks only checked signatures on cheques for more than £1,000.
Name and address supplied
Josie deserves a medal
THE honours system dishes out awards to people for not doing much more than their jobs. Athletes get knighted for simply running round a track when they have been given the equivalent e of a decent wage in Lottery L funding to do so.
Josie Russell, severely injured in a hammer attack in which her mother and sister were killed, has been through far more than the so-called sacrifices our athletes are always telling us they have to make.
Psychologists and social workers are a quick to offer reasons why young people go off the rails. Josie is proof you can’t be responsible for things beyond your control, but you can be responsible for yourself. She deserves to t be honoured.
DAVID PATRICK MOORE, Thornton Heath, Gtr London.
Tit for tat?
THE list of what could happen if the Brexit talks fail (Mail) raises a few pertinent questions.
Would people from EU countries require r an international driving permit p if they wished to drive in Britain? Would they need to have at least six months’ validity left on their passports p to come here?
Would EU exporters to the UK have to t make their products conform to British, rather than European, standards, with a Kitemark rather than a CE mark?
Would EU car makers have to raise their quality and safety standards to the far more stringent UK levels?
As for talk of grounding aircraft, don’t forget that the busiest air lane from Europe to the U.S. crosses UK airspace. The moral is that restrictions work both ways.
GRAHAM HUMPHREY, Bexhill-on-Sea, E. Sussex. WOULD a no- deal Brexit mean Spain would no longer send any produce to the UK, and that British tourists would no longer be welcome there? No!
European countries export more to us than we export to them, so is the EU going to bankrupt its own members? No!
What a load of rubbish is being talked by people who have their own agendas and don’t care for the future of this country. J. GREGORY, Derby.
Targeted by a true tyrant
DIANE ABBOTT’S suggestion that the Government’s immigration policies are akin to those of Idi Amin (Mail) is ridiculous.
I knew Idi Amin well. I was detained by him, banned from Uganda TV and, as a result, was forced to leave the country.
Unlike many Ugandans, who were butchered, I was lucky and survived.
I have not noticed thousands being killed in Britain for opposing government policies.
ROGER THOMAS, Heathfield, E. Sussex.
Lazy Bone
LIKE many people, I started work at 15 and, when I was earning enough, paid income tax. I continue to pay tax in retirement on my pension.
Yet the odious class-war activist Ian Bone, who harangued the ReesMogg children on their doorstep, seems to have prospered from mine and others’ efforts while never working or contributing to the Exchequer. Makes you wonder who is the fool.
PETER STEEN, Bacup, Lancs. LAYABOUT anarchist Ian Bone demonstrates what is wrong with our benefits system.
That he has been able to pursue his vain attempt to undermine society at the taxpayers’ expense for decades beggars belief.
R. J. HODGES, Worthing, W. Sussex.
Empty ‘bargains’
THE news of John Lewis’s profit slump (Mail) is bleak for the UK retail sector. John Lewis is ‘never knowingly undersold’, but pricecutting is getting more common.
On Black Friday weekend, discounting has rocketed by an average 76 per cent since 2016.
Retailers need to learn that this sort of desperado discounting doesn’t add up.
Slashing prices drives sales, but there’s no point if margins are squeezed to losses, or if it devalues a retailer’s products and discourages people from buying full-price items.
Successful retailing is about providing a unique, personal and easy in- store experience to attract customers — that’s where independent retailers have the edge.
In an era when many businesses have forgotten the importance of putting the customer first, shoppers crave the personal touch.
When they discover a new craft beer or line of clothing, they want to know the origins of the product and get a recommendation from the person behind the counter. That’s the sort of added value you can’t put a price on, discounted or otherwise.
HIGOR TORCHIA, London EC2. JOHN LEWIS’S latest plummeting results came days after the company unveiled a childish, pointless rebranding exercise costing millions in fees to consultants. ANDREW SMART, Bromsgrove, Worcs.
Rank stupidity
HAVING served in the Royal Navy for 25 years, I am disgusted that a
few sailors serving aboard the aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth have let down the service by getting drunk and arrested on shore leave.
I’ve travelled all over the world and had many runs ashore, drinking too much. But we never got to the stage where the local police had to arrest us. Where were the shore patrols?
The only consolation is that these sailors will be severely punished on their return to the ship, losing pay, leave and even seniority. DAVID DODMAN, Canterbury, Kent.
Gulag hell
I AM astonished that a group of students at Goldsmiths, University of London have defended Stalin’s gulags (Mail). My late Polish motherin-law had the misfortune to be forced to work in the German factory Siemens & Halske during World War II.
She was in a town near Dresden, where she survived the carpet-bombing and fires by hiding in a forest. All around her, people were being burned to death or blown up.
As a Polish woman in East Germany when it was handed to the Russians, she was rounded up as a suspected spy and sent to Siberia for 11 years. If she were still alive, she could tell those ridiculous students what life was really like in a gulag.
She survived on a daily lump of black bread and a bowl of watery fishbone soup. Female prisoners were regularly hosed down with freezing cold water and had to undertake hard physical work, such as shovelling snow so deep that it came up to their chests. These people had not committed any crimes, but had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
There certainly was no rehabilitation or book clubs, as the students claimed. As she once told me, if they had been given a book, they would have eaten it. JACQUEE STOROZYNSKI-TOLL,
Southend, Essex.