Wes Streeting’s smoking ban could have saved me

I thank Wes Streeting for proposing to extend the smoking ban (“Streeting calls for national debate about smoking outside pubs”, Wednesday 25 September).

In the 1980s and beyond, I worked as a caller at bingo halls in Crawley and Kingston upon Thames. The amount of smoke I had to cope with, before Tony Blair introduced the public indoor ban, was horrendous.

So much so that, as I got older, I was first diagnosed with asthma, then COPD, and now have to use a CPAP machine at all sorts of times during the day, despite never having been a smoker.

We should follow Australia’s lead and pick up from where Rishi Sunak left off – with an eventual all-out ban on smoking within a generation.

Geoffrey Brooking

Havant

It is hard to disagree with John Rentoul’s assertion that most of the allegations by the right-wing press about the prime minister’s declaration of gifts are trivial (“The hounding of Keir Starmer is exactly what the right-wing media wants”, Thursday 26 September).

It appears that their motivation is to undermine the incoming Labour government, and hard not to conclude that they are doing their best to ensure its failure.

From newspapers, whose headlines and opinion pieces champion patriotism and decry others less forthright as “woke”, this may seem strange. Surely, a government that is attempting to resolve the myriad of problems facing the nation deserves some support, at least initially?

Perhaps the editors of these papers and their owners are resentful that they no longer have the influence and impact on government that they clearly had with the Conservative Party. That is understandable, if rather petty. What is less comprehensible is why the public at large is happy to let such undesirable sources set the news agenda, day after day.

Malcolm Harri

Grimsby

Under this Labour government, some 780,000 UK pensioners could lose their winter fuel payments. Some nine million benefit claimants are likely to be affected by the Fraud, Error and Debt Bill, which will migrate as many as three million Employment Support Allowance (ESA) claimants to Universal Credit.

And an as-yet indeterminate number of the three million or so personal independence payment (PIP) claimants who, under Labour’s plans, may lose some or all of their personal independence payment.

I would suggest that the nine million benefits claimants were naturally more inclined to vote Labour. Were.

By my estimate, Starmer is not even 90 days into his government and has just lost almost 10 million potential votes. Good luck winning that second term, mate!

Sadly, the next prime minister’s name may well be “Nigel”. God help us all.

Ian Henderson

Norwich

What is this nonsense that the US defence secretary Lloyd Austin is spouting (“Israel and Lebanon ‘can choose different path’, says US defence chief in London”, Thursday 26 September)?

During his visit, he is reported to have said: “We’ve been committed from the very beginning to help Israel [...] protect their sovereign territory, and that hasn’t changed and won’t change.”

But Israel is not defending its sovereign territory – it is maintaining its brutal military occupation and expansion into Palestinian territory.

US governments have likely known this to be the case for years. In so doing, the US is just as responsible for the 40,000 deaths inflicted on the besieged Palestinians in Gaza.

Barry M Watson

Doncaster

For hundreds of years, the major source of power in this country was water mills. Now, wind and solar farms are the most talked about ways of getting low-carbon energy (“Europe’s renewable energy boom is driving down electricity prices – but it’s not all good news”, Friday 20 September).

But we seem to have forgotten that, even when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow, water still flows downhill. I believe we could utilise the power of the thousands of streams and rivers we are blessed with in this country. Surely, it is not beyond the wit of man to design small generators which could be driven by water driving a paddle wheel.

They could run 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, the costs should be low enough for local authorities and organisations to handle, and they could provide cheap, or even cost-free energy to the local population. It would also be easy to connect up to the National Grid.

Tony Bourner

Axminster

As a lifelong “lefty”, I find myself incredibly disappointed by the freebie culture that the Labour government seems to have welcomed with wide open arms. Another day, another jaw-dropper revelation.

It is revealing quite how deeply ministers’ snouts are in the trough. It may all be legal – but that is poor justification for such greed.

The rest of the country has to manage on salaries, pensions, benefits. Government members should, too.

Perhaps naively, I really expected better from them.

Marilyn Timney

Liss