Let’s be thankful we have sport to escape our country’s bleak reality

Jess Phillips is right: it is so disheartening to come down to earth with such a resounding bump after the great and energising Commonwealth Games and, of course, the fabulous Lionesses. But my word, do we need these great sporting escapes from our beleaguered everyday reality.

Pity we can’t escape this torturous leadership contest, with such polarised views being expounded at length by the two candidates. She is so right: how did we become so accustomed to the idea of food banks, which are so necessary to so many people? We have several more weeks of this political grandstanding, but what’s the betting it will then become government business as usual and disillusionment will set in, even with the Conservative members, who hold their loyalty placards with such hope over actual experience, I should imagine.

Judith A Daniels

Norfolk

We are in a climate change crisis. Instead of promising tax cuts and cash handouts to “solve” the energy price hikes, this is the opportunity for our democratically elected government to put in place measures to address the climate crisis and potentially prevent such occurrences happening in the future.

Alan Barratt

Bristol

So much of today’s Independent is about the weather, which reflects the disastrous cost of living situation. The temperature is too high, the water situation is not being managed properly, workers are striking with frustration, there is a drought in half of England, with many hosepipe bans.

We have to use some power to cook and eat at home, some power to travel and yet, in all sporting events, it is fashionable to blast flares into the air, flames of 20 feet or more.

The flares burn propane and put three times the weight of the propane into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. Any pollution that can be avoided should be avoided. Flares should be banned. 

Every small amount matters: probably only responsible for one house in California catching fire, maybe an extra acre of land ruined by drought in Australia, a few extra houses flooded in this country.

Organisers should donate a small amount to a charity instead of using flares. Something that can be used to proudly promote the organiser rather than them being labelled as a climate destroyer.

Robert Murray

Nottingham

As Johnson preens his air-brushed, blow-dried image and looks for further ways to act as an overpaid irritant, let’s not forget why he has left office.

It was not because he failed to deliver on his promises, oversaw incompetence in most government departments, constantly distorted the truth when called to account for his actions, lacked moral leadership and treated the public with disdain. It was because the parliamentary party decided that he was becoming unelectable.

The same MPs gave him a standing ovation after his final PMQs and are complicit now, alongside the Tory press, in rehabilitating a man who should be hanging his head in shame.

Just like the Republican Party in its sanitising of the execrable Trump, it is hard to know who is more to be despised: the Conservative Party or he who would still be “king of the world”.

Graham Powell

Cirencester

It shouldn’t take environment secretary George Eustice making an approach to water company executives to bring home to them that there is, and has been for some time, a cataclysmic situation pending.

Unfortunately, the top people managing the water companies, on their obscene salaries with eye-watering bonuses, are so taken up with profits and share values they have neither interest nor understanding of their many millions of consumers’ needs.

A quick glance at the backgrounds of these people shows the vast majority are financial specialists of one kind or another. Civil engineers, the people who designed and then brought about construction of all the infrastructure – and then maintained it until the big companies took over in 1989 – are about as rare as hens’ teeth.

Ian Wingfield

Derbyshire