Our love goes out to Rachael and Steve Bland

Rachael Bland’s news (BBC radio presenter tweets “goodbye” after being told she has days to live) is very sad, and my heart goes out to her family and friends. It makes me realise yet again that when I beat the odds and survived I was very lucky. I was living in the States at the time, and when I got my diagnosis, I was only the ninth person in the USA to have had the particular type of cancer I had. Seven months of chemo and a month of radiation got me through it.

However, I have always believed and still do to this day, what really got me through it was the love and support of my husband. So I write today to ask you to please think of Steve, Rachael’s husband, of the anguish he must be going through and the outcome he will have least wanted.

When you go through cancer treatment you are so wrapped up in it that you don’t see the world beyond you. It is your loved ones who have to endure the pain, the feeling of helplessness and now, for Steve, the ultimate agony of losing the woman he loves.

From one Steve to another, I wish I could reach out and hug you.

Steve Mumby
Bournemouth

Steve Hawkes is just myopic if he thinks that voters wouldn’t get a chance to throw out Corbyn if a Labour government “bankrupted the country” (Letters).

That’s the whole point of democracies. They have the RIGHT and the OPPORTUNITY to vote again when they’ve been duped.

Those essential characteristics of REAL DEMOCRACY are conspicuously absent in this whole Brexit debacle.

There is an essential element of the art of dealmaking: “any deal can be a good deal at the RIGHT PRICE .... NO deal can be a good deal at ANY PRICE”.

And yet that is precisely what the country is being offered now and it is obviously not what people voted for in the first instance.

If the truth be known, the reason that Leavers are so frightened of another referendum is that they know that now that the truth and the realities are known about the likely cost and consequences of Brexit, the likelihood is that the 35 per cent or so of the country that voted for Brexit would lose the opportunity of forcing their delusions on the 65 per cent (or so) who did not vote for Brexit.

True democracy demands that there is the opportunity to either reaffirm the original vote or chuck it in the bin.

The trouble with ideologues is that they don’t like to give people the opportunity to disagree.

Simon Carrel
Address supplied

I fully support The Independent in their efforts to turn this dire situation around.

I am sick of people – of the prime minister – saying “we” voted for this. “The People” voted for this.

“We” did not vote for this. HALF the people voted to stay. So do me a favour prime minister, politicians and naysayers, do not insult those of us who voted remain by saying “the people” voted for this. Because we did not. It was such a small minority difference that it should never have been allowed to be classed as a “win”.

Put your pride in your pocket and go back to the EU and say we’ve changed our minds, because this utter ridiculousness will be the death of our nation.

Amy Trollope
Address supplied

Speaking as a Remainer, I voted on the basis of “better the devil you know than the devil you don’t know” and my goodness, what we didn’t know has certainly turned out to be the very devil of a mess!

Gillian Cook
Market Harborough

The revelation that “Entire cities left without police stations as hundreds close following fund cuts” prompts me to ask how many of these expensive buildings were really necessary in the first place.

There is obviously a need for some larger designated stations to house admin units, control rooms and charging facilities but policing in general would surely be far better served by officers working from much smaller units.

When I was a serving Metropolitan Police inspector during the 1980s/90s I formally suggested that police boxes be re-introduced in mobile updated form, equipped with all mod cons and situated in the hearts of those beats most needing their presence.

The idea was rejected on the grounds of costs!

A few years ago I called into the multi-million pound Belgravia Police Station to deposit a wallet I’d found in the Victoria area, only to find the place totally deserted with nobody even answering my phone calls from the reception desk in the foyer.

Closing down so many conventional stations could prove to be a blessing in disguise for any imaginative chief constables out there but sadly so many of the current crop are so defeatist they must have Churchill spinning in his sepulchre.

John Kenny
Norfolk

There was a news item on TV saying that Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp were down today. As I don’t use them I didn’t know but somehow I muddled through the day anyway.

Is it too silly to suggest that many people may not have known these were down as they would have no news source to tell them that these were down? I suppose that not receiving a few hundred phone notification beeps may have been an indication but somehow the young ones seem distracted to me.

Maybe a day off the phone, and away from these time wasting irritants, may have actually been good for them.

Dennis Fitzgerald
Melbourne, Australia

Baldev Sharma (Letters) is right. We should stop this ridiculous twice-yearly changing of the clocks for winter and summer. It makes far more sense to leave the clocks alone and have the standard working day in summer start at 10am instead of 9am.

David Rose
Sutton Coldfield