Letters: Tory policy on incapacity benefit

As somebody who draws incapacity benefits because of a disability in the autism spectrum, I have felt disgusted, angry and depressed listening to Conservative shadow ministers assert with pride that people drawing incapacity benefits who are judged to be capable of work will receive a cut in benefit of £25 a week (report, 5 October).

For people with autism and other types of disabilities, it is not a simple matter of can or can't work, or wanting or not wanting work. Many people (myself included) have a disability that makes us clumsy, and slow to respond to instructions. In my case, my handwriting is also badly affected. I could not write this letter if I did not have access to a computer.

Most people on incapacity benefit would love a job if they could do it and keep it. When I decided to go to my Job Centre about the possibility of returning to work, many people said that I was foolish, because I would draw attention to myself and be taken off incapacity benefit and put on Jobseeker's Allowance. The fear of getting put on to Jobseeker's Allowance makes many disabled people afraid to go to Job Centre Plus to ask for advice about entering the labour market.

The modern Tory party may be tolerant of ethnic minorities and gays, but people with little-understood disabilities who find it difficult to gain work could bear the brunt of Tory intolerance.

Peter J Brown

Middlesbrough

The truth about being a postman

I'm a postman from west London. When I started seven years ago, I had one manager and 38 postmen to cover this postcode. We now have 27 postmen and two managers. For the past two years and up until a month ago, I had three managers.

All of these managers and all of those above them will get a bonus, starting at around 10 per cent of their salary. This bonus is based not on quality or performance, but merely on budget. They are virtually guaranteed this bonus as we have lost a further two jobs. Obviously ordinary postmen are not party to this scheme.

We have a disparate workforce with ages starting from 18 all the way to 64. Our older postmen cannot sustain the same walking pace as the younger members, and some cannot now complete their longer routes within their paid hours. No allowance is made for the varying speeds and no attempt is made to make the quicker ones help the slower ones. But these older postmen bring other strengths to the job including, in my experience, a much greater concern for quality of service and a deep local knowledge.

There is an argument to be had about mail volumes but it is indisputable that we have had around 1,000 addresses added to this postcode since the last wave of job cuts. These all need delivering to, whether they have one or 10 letters.

Clearly there is much to this strike, but I would just like the public to get an idea of how we're run.

Richard Black

London W7

Why do union leaders encourage strike action where the likely outcome will be their members going down with their colours nailed to the mast?

Arthur Scargill did it in the 1980s, when demand for power was at its lowest. Now Post Office workers are striking, at a time when emails are cutting deep into mail, and parcel companies are gleeful at the prospect of being handed business on a plate.

The interests of union members would be far better served by negotiation and delaying tactics during their industry's decline, rather than hastening the end by their own hand.

Pete Parkins

Lancaster

I found "A Postman's lament" (14 October) very pertinent. Last week one of the Royal Mail's rival companies tried and failed to deliver a parcel to me.

The reason? The delivery person assumed which house was mine, in spite of it having the wrong number and actually being on a different road. Finding no one in, the delivery person left a card and took my parcel to yet another house.

This is the huge downside to companies other than Royal Mail making deliveries. Because they don't deliver regularly, they don't know the layout of the streets, and they're in too much of a rush to find out. And if they can't deliver your mail they take it to an office miles away instead of the Royal Mail's local office, which is usually reasonably nearby.

Susan Taylor

Leeds

As a postie myself, I would like to thank you very much for publishing "A Postman's Lament". I would, however, disagree with a couple of minor points.

Firstly I am only allowed to take out a bag weighing 11kg and not the 13-16kg as suggested, therefore I take out more bags than your writer. Secondly, a finish time of 3pm is something of which we can only dream; close to 4pm is nearer the mark.

Regarding the number of letters in the grey boxes; Royal Mail claim 150 per box is average, so this morning I did my own count. One of my boxes contained 231, another 298 – almost double the number estimated by Royal Mail. It is no wonder that posties have not noticed the supposed drop in the volumes of mail.

Finally, we work five days out of six so on the days when someone is off, that round is shared out between the remaining staff with no overtime or extra payment.

I have done some hard jobs in my time, but I can honestly say this is the toughest one I have ever done – both physically and mentally.

Jane Wells

Tollesbury, Essex

A hard-to-emulate school system

Johann Hari overlooks a set of unusual factors that calls into question whether the Raleigh experience can be reproduced elsewhere ("From North Carolina, a model of how to transform education," 16 October).

The Wake County School Board, which encompasses both the city of Raleigh and its suburbs, has a 32-year history of busing, so that parents are accustomed to long rides for their children. Moreover, the local economy is relatively prosperous.

What would happen, however, if a district had a large black middle-class or a large white low-income population? This question is particularly relevant in light of the widening national income gap in the US and in England. According to the Children's Defense Fund, nearly 18 percent of America's children live in poverty.

Boston was forced to work with its existing composition of students within its school boundaries after a federal court exempted the largely white and affluent suburbs surrounding the city from the socio-economic integration plan. As a result, Boston was not able to post the hoped-for results.

Walt Gardner

Los Angeles

Johann Hari gave an inspiring example of how society could be healed and education for all truly improved. What a tragedy that we will never be able to do anything like this in this country.

Can you imagine half the pupils of Eton College being shunted into Slough comprehensive school, and vice versa? The problem of this country remains the class system.

It is easy to be born and brought up in leafy southern England, be privately educated, get a job in government or a bank, and know nothing about our multi-cultural society.

If middle- and upper-class parents had no option but to send their children to local, truly comprehensive schools, we would have excellent education for all – at a stroke.

Will Watson

London N10

Johann Hari could have mentioned religious segregation of school-age children in communities as another reason for social incohesion.

Robert Stewart

Wilmslow, Cheshire

Is global warming just a theory?

Man-made global warming is, as Paul Madeley writes (letters, 15 October), a theory. Like the theories of evolution and relativity, it has been supported by substantial evidence. In this it is quite unlike the hypothesis of global cooling, that was briefly put forward by two scientists in the 1970s, or of a looming millennium bug, which I think was around for a few months. As for a BSE epidemic, I seem to remember quite drastic government action before that threat receded.

Furthermore, a meaningful international agreement to make significant cuts in carbon emissions roughly 20 years after the establishment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and more than 200 years after Svante Arrhenius theorised a causal link between atmospheric CO2 concentrations and global warming would hardly constitute "a knee-jerk response".

John Hindley

London N2

If the US wants to stop sharing, let it

I understand that US officials are threatening to stop sharing military intelligence with us (report, 16 October). If they don't want access to information on incoming missiles from the Fylingdales Early Warning Station or radio intercepts from GCHQ Cheltenham we should not force it on them. If they want to give up access to bases in the UK and Cyprus, well, they are a sovereign nation and have a right to do so. Indeed, should they wish to surrender early the US Airforce's lease on Diego Garcia, we should accept the fact, even at the cost of giving up all our military bases on US soil.

Hugh Minor

Cardiff

Seekers of the true Labyrinth

Visitors to Crete seeking the Labyrinth (report, 16 October) might well read Mary Renault's 1958 novel The King Must Die before they go. In this she argues that as labyrinth means "House of the Double Axe" – the double axe being the symbol of the Minoans who had a 600-roomed palace at Knossos – the word took on the meaning of a maze in which it was easy to lose oneself, especially visitors from little city states on the Greek mainland, at a time when the Minoans controlled the waters of the Eastern Mediterranean. A complex coastal palace site seems a more likely place of pilgrimage than a stone quarry 20 miles inland.

Michael J J Day

Settle, North Yorkshire

How to feel younger

Since Gilly Usborne (letters, 12 October) says she declines offers of seats on the tube in order to "feel younger", I suggest that she could achieve the desired effect (and possibly avoid the dilemma as well) by putting a bit of colour in her grey hair.

Julie Harrison

Hertford

Turkish prefabs

We would like to thank you for your report on the prefab buildings donated by Turkey to house Palestinian civilians (report, 17 October). While we are concerned to get prefabricated buildings into Gaza to house the homeless as reported, we are hopeful of getting a response in a short time to our request for permission from the Israeli authorities to do so. And we would like to emphasise that we remain grateful for the fruitful assistance and co-operation that we have had from Israeli authorities up to now.

Kazim Yilmaz

Head of Delegation,

Turkish Red Crescent Society,

Jerusalem Co-ordination office

MPs' wages

I have a simple solution to determining MPs' salaries. Let us set them at a simple multiple of the national minimum wage, based on, say, a 2,000-hour year. At six times the minimum wage, currently £5.80, MPs would receive a remuneration of £66,120. Ministers' salaries would use appropriate higher multiples. Politicians would then benefit personally by creating an economy that could afford an increasing minimum wage.

Ian Quayle

Fownhope, Hampshire

Electric-car quandary

Will someone explain to me how electric cars will reduce overall carbon emissions, without many other changes first ("Cars must be electric says climate tsar", 12 October)? Assume the electricity will be wholly green (a big ask). The cars' still-limited range implies that they will be built and bought mainly as additional vehicles. Parking and congestion-charge concessions make it likely that having more of them will reduce the proportion of urban journeys by public transport.

Peter Robb

London N1

Stand by for action

David Cameron says that if he comes to power he will ban the manufacture of televisions with stand-by buttons (report, 17 October). Both logic and my memory tell me that these buttons were introduced to prevent people from leaving their televisions switched on all the time, and wasting electricity. So will Gordon Brown now propose smart TVs which switch off if no one is watching?

Dr John Etherington

Llanhowell, Pembrokeshire