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'All children should have a decent opportunity to become healthy, positive and hard-working adults
Gary from Essex (MetroTalk, Mon) is in favour of Nigel Farage’s plans to reintroduce the two-child benefit cap so that only households with two British parents who work full-time would be able to claim.
He asks why the already burdened taxpayer should be asked to help people who have children and ‘can’t afford to feed/clothe them’?
If he is not being sarcastic it must rank as the most callous statement ever printed in your letters page.
Gary, I don’t know if you have children and both you and your partner (if you have one) are British but, unlike Farage, if you fall on hard times, I don’t want to see your kids (or you) malnourished and walking around in rags.
Yes, there will always be those who will seek to shirk or abuse any tax and welfare system and we should have measures to stop or discourage this.
But children don’t choose their parents and surely all children should have a decent opportunity to become healthy, positive and hard-working adults who go on to contribute in every single way to making this country great again. Neil, Yorkshire
This reader agrees
It’s a simple answer, Gary – we want children to have clothes and food. Alex, London
‘Does Farage really hate his own countryfolk and their offspring so much as to want to leave them destitute?’
It’s precisely because the poor can’t afford to feed/clothe their children that the taxpayer must intervene via child benefit.
As a taxpayer, I am very happy to pay for this – and it’s cheaper than any other social intervention, such as hospitalisation for poor dietary outcomes. After all, we don’t want a return to the kind of extreme Victorian-era poverty where children run-around barefoot, dressed in rags and/or are crippled by nutritional deficiencies such as rickets. Or do we?
Is Britain to become a country where the needs of the poor remain unmet? Does Farage really hate his own countryfolk and their offspring so much as to want to leave them destitute? Robert Bucknor, Tunbridge Wells
Would Starmer win race against a lettuce?
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We had it with Liz Truss and a lettuce – it’s time to launch the ‘prime minister versus vegetable’ race again.
It’s amusing to observe the cyclical nature of history. Back in 2022, Sir Keir Starmer dealt then prime minister Boris Johnson a decisive blow over his promotion of Christopher Pincher MP, despite knowing he had been accused of sexual assault. Starmer pointed out that Johnson was fully aware of Pincher’s behaviour and asked how he could have promoted him.
Now Peter Mandelson, the former British ambassador to the US, has become Starmer’s Pincher.
The PM knew about his associate’s ties to paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein prior to appointing him to his position and his judgement has been questioned. However, having fired him from his ambassador role, the PM allowed Mandelson to resign from the Labour Party on his own terms rather than expelling him.
This scandal will be the final nail in the coffin of Starmer’s rule.
Even before the Mandelson controversy, Starmer was setting historic records for public distrust and now we are witnessing the rapid collapse of the Labour Party. The resignations of chief of staff Morgan McSweeney and communications chief Tim Allan are unlikely to remedy the situation.
Bookmakers have already started taking bets on the next PM and I wonder if Starmer remembers the demise of those who stood in his shoes before him?
After all, Truss lost that longevity race to a lettuce, would you bet on Starmer doing any better? Iain Brocklebank, Glasgow
Did Farage and Truss talk about her mini-budget at climate change-denying lunch?
Nigel Farage had lunch with, among others, Liz Truss at an expensive Mayfair Club, organised and paid for by the climate change-denying Heartland Institute on January 19.
Perhaps the pair of them chatted about her disastrous mini-budget which, at the time, Farage described as ‘the best Conservative budget since 1986’ – before it saw the then prime minister compared with a lettuce.
Seemingly, copies of the views of the Heartland Institute were passed around over lunch before a Farage speech, with one diner saying, ‘I think it’s likely some of the things they are calling for will end up in a Reform programme for government.’
So, which of the ‘things they are calling for’ could this be referring to?
Could one of these be the promotion of private healthcare, much as last year’s Reform manifesto pledge giving tax breaks to those with private healthcare and insurance?
As we know, if you have private health insurance you can skip the waiting list but with Reform you get a tax break as well. The cost? It has been estimated at £1.7billion per year.
This is the cost in taxes that you and I, who can’t afford private health insurance, will have to pay to the wealthy who can. Another of the ‘things they are calling for’ is the promotion of private education, much like, once again, the Reform manifesto, which promised tax breaks for the wealthy sending their children to private schools.
This once again gets paid for by other taxpayers who can’t afford private schools. Why should we pay the wealthy for sending their children to Rugby or Farage’s old school, Dulwich College?
Perhaps Reform’s most shameless policy mimicking the Heartland Institute is the rejection of climate change policies and promotion of polluting fossil fuels.
Farage has referred to the climate crisis as a ‘scam’. Parroting his hero, Donald Trump, he has dismissed wind energy as the ‘biggest collective insanity’ he has ever seen. This is despite the fact that it is the cheapest form of energy and one which gives Great Britain energy security from the likes of Trump and Putin, whose countries are the two largest exporters of fossil fuels.
Perhaps Farage is happy to be under the thumb of his two best friends?Mike Baldwin, Thorverton
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