The late Queen wouldn’t be impressed by Liz Truss’s tax cuts

I’m no expert in the field, but it seems to me that the “trickle down” philosophy of economics (biblically, at least) means you pile more good things onto the rich man’s already overloaded table, in the expectation that a few more leavings will reach poor old Lazarus lying at the gate.

It is but days since our government was singing her late Majesty’s praises; but I wonder, what would that lady of sincere Christian conviction privately have made of the proposed tax cuts disproportionately favouring the wealthiest in society?

I, for one, wanted to hope that the past fortnight might inspire the new cabinet to offer a kinder politics.

Rev Peter Sharp

Derbyshire

The health secretary, Therese Coffey, has outlined her plan for dealing with the NHS backlog without the help of the national insurance rise, which is about to be removed (less than half a year after it was put in place).

A million volunteers are to be asked to help out the NHS with non-medical tasks. They already did this for the pandemic, so it should be no hardship to do it again.

There is clearly no difference between that and supporting a new PM’s promise to cut taxes (to appeal to the considerably fewer than 1 million voters who got her the top job) by doing an existing paid job for nothing, and taking on new roles to cope with a global pandemic which – however much we may think the government exacerbated it by poor decisions and delays – we cannot blame the government for starting in the first place.

Indeed, this is continuing a trend I have noticed among people who have served in the cabinet. Jacob Rees-Mogg, when confronted with the fact that many people in one of the richest nations in the world cannot afford to eat, praised the charitable efforts of those who organise and contribute to food banks.

Priti Patel, when faced with a huge refugee crisis arising from Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, was very proud of all those people who embarked on DIY refugee assistance – first find your refugee, then work through insane amounts of ridiculous paperwork to obtain visas, and probably arrange their transport too, before opening your own home to provide them with somewhere to stay.

Not to be outdone, Coffey also wants to recruit volunteers (by my calculations, roughly a 10th of the population between 15 and 85 who are not currently in work, which includes unpaid carers and people who are infirm or disabled) to do a state-paid job for free, as this will help rich people reduce their tax burden.

The perks? A warm place to be during working hours, and free tuition on the avoidance of the Oxford comma.

Katharine Powell

Neston

When defending the obscene levels of pay for senior executives, we are usually told that it is necessary to ensure the correct calibre and level of expertise required to ensure the profits and growth of the companies.

You report the CEO of JD Sports is to receive a payoff of £5.5m despite the £4.3m fine for actions during a takeover and the subsequent £50m loss. Hardly value for money.

G Forward

Stirling

As our new prime minister and others increase their sabre-rattling rhetoric and acclaim a desire to “bring Russia to her knees”, we should be aware that Putin – with his huge nuclear arsenal – is clearly unstable enough to commit genocide and suicide concurrently.

Far better to concentrate all of our efforts and communication technologies on exposing Putin and his acolytes as the dangerous demagogues they are to the people they are deceiving in their own lands.

Martin Deighton

Woodbridge

Hindu-Muslim disturbances in Leicester, in my view, have nothing to do with Hindu nationalism or Islamophobia, but flow directly from successive governments’ misguided policy of using religion as the basis for integrating ethnic minorities.

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Ethnic minorities, in the 1960s and 1970s, were quite content to organise themselves on the basis of their national origins such as British-Indians, British-Pakistanis etc. Religion played little part in such mobilisation, as they belonged to different faiths.

It was multiculturalism, introduced in the 1980s, that placed religion at the centre of their British identity, thereby re-christening them as British-Hindus, British-Muslims and British-Sikhs.

Religious identity, however, can easily be transformed into communal identity, and hence communalism – the belief that one’s allegiance to one’s own religion must take precedence over one’s allegiance to a wider society. It is the propping up of a communal – as opposed to religious – identity by the British state, which is largely responsible for Hindu-Muslim tensions in Leicester and elsewhere.

Randhir Singh Bains

Essex