We are now paying for our willingness to accept Russian money

The new German chancellor has shown moral courage and leadership by shutting down the Nord Stream 2 project, in the full knowledge of the economic damage to his own country. What chance that Boris Johnson will do the same and shut off the flow of Russian cash into London? None I suspect; we know he lacks the same morals and leadership shown by his German counterpart.

While he is in hock to wealthy Russian donors and his wealthy right-wing Tory backbenchers we will only see the sort of non sanctions announced yesterday on banks no one has heard of and a few oligarchs already under sanctions.

G Forward

Stirling

It does not seem so long ago that well-heeled Russians (or perhaps they had gained British citizenship by then) were paying considerable sums of money at Conservative fundraising occasions to play leading Conservative politicians at tennis. Perhaps this was part of Putin’s “great game” to place moles on and in the “playing fields” of England?

James Bell

Brussels

I read with great interest Tom Peck’s article (‘Boris Johnson will reach for his Churchill cosplay act – it won’t wash’, Voices, 22 February) regarding Boris Johnson’s announcement of Russian sanctions in the Commons yesterday.

One of Mr Peck’s comments on Mr Johnson was, “He speaks with no authority because he commands no respected.” What a brilliant observation. It would be extremely apt for a book subtitle or on a gravestone.

As is so often heard these days, authorities rule by the will of the people. That will is given because of the trust and respect engendered through honesty and endeavours in favour of the people. I’m afraid that Johnson and his cronies have sorely failed to display any such attributes.

Keith Poole

Basingstoke

Angela Epstein (‘We need an 11+ for sixth formers to mark out the stars from those who’ve benefited from the pandemic’, Voices, 20 February) is right to point out that teacher assessments by schools lack the objectivity that external exams had before the pandemic.

The idea of adding an additional 11+ style exam to account for the disrupted teaching many students have experienced in varying degrees will not counter the fact that parents who can afford it will pay for tuition, so their children excel on these tests as well. All the exam boards have to do is offer questions on the whole syllabus and ask students to answer a small number of any of them. But are the exam boards willing to go back to the way A levels were?

Kartar Uppal

Sutton Coldfield

I am appalled at the huge phenomenon of “ghost flights”, involving empty aircraft flying between airports simply to maintain landing slots (‘Almost 15,000 ‘ghost flights’ have left UK since pandemic began’, News, 22 February).

This is environmental madness – not just because of the carbon footprint of these empty flights, but because of the valuable fossil fuels being consumed, at a time when world events may cause serious fuel shortages. There are also the safety implications of these unnecessary flights through our congested airspace.

Urgent legislation is needed to ban these unnecessary flights, by reforming airport landing slot allocation, and by introducing new taxes on flying based on aircraft occupancy percentages, with empty flights attracting a massive tax burden on the responsible airline.

Ian McNicholas

Ebbw Vale

Caroline Lucas, in her criticism of nuclear energy (‘Another nuclear power station is not the answer to the energy crisis’, February 22), misses two points. If Hinkley Point C had been operating over the last three months it would have been returning considerable sums of money to electricity consumers, as the wholesale power price has been above the £120/MWh “strike price” for most of this period. The strike price is not only a floor, it is also a cap.

More important though is the effect of the variability of wind and solar power on market prices as their penetration grows. To take South Australia with its large renewables capacity as a (non-nuclear) example, throughout last September the average wholesale power price between 7am and 3.3pm in the afternoon was negative, as renewables swamped the system and electricity became a good of negative value.

A similar picture is seen with growing frequency in Germany, California and even the UK. The average cost of generation per unit does not matter much if someone then has to be paid to take the product away (or generators have to be paid to stop generating).

If renewables truly were the cheapest option in use we would remove the “must-take” contracts and constraint payments that so heavily subsidise them. But the result would be that when renewables were generating heavily they would earn next to nothing as power prices collapsed, while the rest of us would still have to pay reliable generators to come in when the wind dropped and the daylight faded.

It is no coincidence that Germany, 22 years after its Renewable Energy Sources Act, has the highest power prices in Europe and carbon emissions some 30 per cent above the European average. The contrast with nuclear-powered France could not be starker – barely one-tenth of the carbon emissions per unit of power produced and at lower cost too.

Malcolm Grimston

Honorary senior research fellow, Imperial Centre for Energy Policy and Technology, Imperial College, London

Recent heavy rains fell on hills that have been deforested for millennia and continue to be treeless because they are heavily grazed by sheep, the wool of which is no longer valued and the meat of which is not particularly prized by the British. So, it should not be surprising to those who have set up home or businesses alongside rivers such as the Severn, that they are currently inundated by flood water. And climate change – with us already – will make this more frequent.

The short-term answer is property adaptation, or, where this is impracticable, evacuation. The inevitable calls for future-proofed flood protection would mean enormous expense for questionable gain and adequate barriers would destroy the amenity sought by living alongside the low-flow river. Calls for dredging demonstrate a lack of understanding of its futility, especially in places like Bewdley, Iron Bridge and Shrewsbury.

Ian Reid

York