Nobody should spend their final days worrying about energy bills

Marie Curie is one of the 140 organisations calling for a consultation on an energy bills social tariff ahead of winter, as discussed in your recent article.

Without targeted financial support, terminally ill people could freeze to death this winter.

Our nurses are regularly seeing dying patients in cold houses, spending their last weeks and months unable to afford to keep themselves warm.

Nobody should spend their final days worrying about energy bills. It’s time the government came good on its promise of an energy social tariff consultation.

Mark Jackson, senior policy and research manager, Marie Curie

London

France is a big, square country. Ditto China. So they need a large network of high-speed rail lines to join their principal cities. And they are both well on the way to delivering such a network. The very act of building the lines raises their GDP, but more importantly, the lines will increase their productivity and efficiency for the next century plus.

Meanwhile, the UK is fortunate to be a relatively short and narrow country, so we only need a single spine of high-speed rail with offshoots. Furthermore, the spine is justified predominantly as providing extra capacity to the existing but undercapacity conventional railway.

And yet, we can’t even provide that. Even the best case – seemingly highly unlikely – scenario would be high speed from Dover to Manchester with a discontinuity between St Pancras and Euston, and no connection to two of the countries in the Kingdom, nor to the east.

How have we fallen from the preeminent industrial power to an ailing minor island off Europe with no vision – and consequently no future?

Tim Sidaway

Hertfordshire

How did Laurence Fox think he could get away with using such language on air? And his “apology” simply dug a bigger hole for himself to get out of.

A person whose verbal filter is non-extant is a loose cannon and will get himself and others associated with him into trouble. And to think that he wants to become an MP... I put him into the same frame as Mr Trump and Ms Braverman.

All three of them are an embarrassment to have around and cause untold distress to the people for whom they work, have met briefly or simply want to disparage for the sake of their deluded humour.

Whether Mr Fox is sacked or not is of little interest to me or millions of others, because we don’t watch the TV vehicle he and Dan Wootton work for because it is so trashy, unethical and valueless.

Keith Poole

Basingstoke

I feel the senseless felling of the Sycamore Gap tree is a metaphor for what is being felled in our country. Our once stable (or thereabouts) governments seem like several lifetimes ago, and now we have our Conservative MPs holding forth on a very controversial broadcasting station such as GB News.

I agree with Caroline Nokes, the Commons women and equalities committee chair, who said it’s “very odd for her colleagues to have presenting gigs while they have day jobs to do”.

Once upon a time many moons ago, governance in this country appeared almost staid, slightly boring and not a topic to concern oneself much with. The fact that this has been completely turned on its head is very discombobulating.

Admittedly there wasn’t the all-pervasive and all powerful social media, but there does feel a real sense of losing heads and credibility. So like the felling of that wonderful, ancient and iconic tree, is this government in serious danger of ripping up the once sacrosanct rule book so dramatically and indeed so short-sightedly?

Judith A Daniels

Norfolk