A plant-based diet is the only way to end cruelty to animals

The harrowing cruelty inflicted on pigs as reported in The Independent (News, 3 December) is soul-destroying. Despite their promises of adhering to strict animal welfare standards, supermarkets like Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Morrisons and Asda continue dealing with slaughterhouse companies that flaunt the rules with impunity. Consumers should shun meat by adopting a plant-based diet. That is the only way the suffering of animals in slaughterhouses will stop.

Nitin Mehta

Croydon

Lord Deben hits the nail on the head in his recent speech (”Call for people to eat ‘less and better meat’ from UK to tackle climate crisis”, News, 2 December). British red meat can be produced in an environmentally friendly, ethical and sustainable way, and should be seen as part of the solution to tackling climate change.

It is some of the most low-carbon, high-quality and high-welfare meat in the world, and should not be unfairly tarnished in a one-sided debate. Eighty per cent of the land used to rear beef and lamb in Wales, for example, is unsuitable for uses other than raising grass-fed livestock. And these grasslands and hedgerows where they graze act as vast carbon sinks.

So, let’s have a sensible debate about eating meat and focus on producing and eating higher quality and more sustainable produce.

Gwyn Howells

Chief executive, Meat Promotion Wales

The chancellor’s decision not to increase capital gains tax is another missed opportunity to get our tax system “match-fit” for the looming showdown with the realities of the 21st Century (“Rishi Sunak shelves proposal to hike capital gains tax, pointing to ‘burden’”, News, 1 December). The persistence of inequality in health, education and opportunity, the existential threat of climate change and the crisis in social care affects us all and the responses must be collective if they are to succeed.

Yet our tax system undermines any semblance of mutuality. By taxing earned income more heavily than unearned income, the Treasury effectively makes those without a second property, without stocks and shares or without fine art and antiques more responsible for funding the responses to the challenges we collectively face, than those who are better able to afford it.

Professor Henrietta Moore

Institute for Global Prosperity, University College London

1. The prime minister refuses to deny that one or more parties took place at Downing Street in December last year, implicitly confirming that they did.

2. Covid restrictions operating at the time banned such events.

3. The prime minister said in the Commons on Wednesday that no Covid rules were broken.

Aristotle himself would struggle to reconcile these three statements – all three cannot be true at the same time. Given this, it looks as if the prime minister has deliberately misled the House of Commons – surely a resigning issue?

Paul Rex

Hants

I could not help but notice the plethora of political commentators and others, who have analysed the figures around the Old Bexley and Sidcup by-election and arrived at various cast-iron conclusions. Needless to say, most of them contradict each other.

However, the one certainty is the supreme irony of the by-election winner, Louie French, for the Conservative Party. Could they possibly have found an individual with a more Gallic name when the party is at its most Europhobic ever?

Robert Boston

Kent

I was disappointed to learn that even Amol Rajan, one of the more able presenters on TV and radio and former editor of this newspaper, has succumbed to the BBC’s campaign to dumb everything down, save the outpourings of Boris Johnson et al, by offering up an apology for comments he made years ago about some members of the royal family. As a long time supporter of the campaign to abolish the monarchy, I am bound to find his comments about certain individuals of that careworn dynasty entirely plausible.

I also wonder if the BBC’s desire to reduce everything they make to a politically correct mundanity has influenced Andrew Marr’s decision to move on?

J Wells

Alresford