This government does not invest in the future – the school concrete scandal shows that

There was never going to be a better opportunity to mend the school buildings problem – about which the government was well aware – than when schools were closed during the pandemic.

No surprise that no action was taken since we have been governed for over a decade by a government that has had no long-term plan to improve the lot of the nation’s citizens, other than to have an ideological commitment to austerity measures followed by a fixation with Brexit. Neither of these policies made any sense and we are reaping the bitter harvest that it will take a generation to rectify.

As if the next generation had not suffered enough through being kept from adequate schooling in 2020 and 2021, this current scandal shows how little our government is prepared to care for or invest in the future of anyone other than themselves.

Graham Powell

Cirencester

I do not know how much money was saved throughout education when austerity commenced in 2010. However, one thing I do believe is that the cost of repairing school buildings along with pupil displacement will be almost certainly larger.

Education thus joins the police and the probation service in being perfect examples of false economies to be avoided in the future by short-term-thinking inept politicians. Will lessons be learnt: I doubt it!

Robert Boston

Kent

In light of the current fracas about the use of RAAC concrete, it would be useful to know how many of our MPs have some grasp of technical or scientific matters. I suspect that the number would not be sufficient to field a decent football team.

However, don’t bother to tot up the MPs from the legal or financial fields, for example, as their numbers would be sufficient to set up their own football league.

Den Lystor

Address supplied

If, as Samuel Johnson stated “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel”, then it is clear that the “war on culture” is the very last refuge of a floundering Suella Braverman. As home secretary, she has utterly failed to get to grips with the multitude of problems in which her department has become mired.

She has failed in her initiatives for unlawfully treating asylum seekers as criminals by shipping them out to Rwanda (or the Ascension Islands/whatever the next rocky outpost she can dream up). She is overseeing a department which is in stasis while trying to deal with asylum applications from increasing numbers of arrivals, despite the much-lauded “Stop the Boats” initiative.

She has failed the policing of crime, particularly for rape victims, whilst badgering police forces to investigate every crime irrespective of its severity – well isn’t that what they’re supposed to do anyway?

So, in order to cover her utter incompetence in her role in just about every aspect, she announces that she is commissioning a report into whether police officers are getting involved in “political activism”.

For pity’s sake, is this woman so incapable of doing her proper job, that she has to resort to hunting out cultural/woke issues to deflect attention from her devastating incompetence?

We need a fundamental change that only an election can deliver and we need it now.

Kate Hall

Leeds