Letters: Conservative voters will not forgive or forget how they were betrayed
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SIR – In his article (“The unbreakable Tory alliance between Court and Country is finally shattering”, Comment, November 18) Robert Tombs writes: “What is fatal to a party is not failure, but a sense of betrayal.”
This precisely explains why I shall not be voting Conservative at the next election. My vote has been taken for granted. It seems that successive Conservative prime ministers have believed that all they needed to do was to pay lip service to the opinions of their natural supporters, without taking any corresponding action.
Thomas Hamilton-Jones
Monmouth
SIR – Abandoned, bewildered and betrayed is how many of those who voted Conservative feel. The party has wasted a huge opportunity in the so-called Red Wall region of the country. If politicians ignore the people, the people will exact revenge.
Cliff Peers
Chester-le-Street, Co Durham
SIR – Charles Russam (Letters, November 19) comments on what a shame it is that the Government had no one clever or diligent enough to have reached, some months earlier, the same conclusion as the President of the Supreme Court on the former home secretary Suella Braverman’s Rwanda scheme.
In the same edition, you report that civil servants will be allowed to work abroad for two weeks of the year while visiting friends and family, rather than having to take annual leave.
Surely this standard of governance provides the explanation.
Jonathan Speakman-Brown
Orpington, Kent
SIR – Rwanda was picked by Suella Braverman as a trustworthy, honest and moral destination for illegal immigrants. So it will presumably be only too pleased to return the £140 million if the plan comes to naught.
Timothy James
Courteenhall, Northamptonshire
SIR – Effective foreign policy and meaningful international relationships take years to build up and bed in. It is now almost certain that within a year or so the Conservatives and the Foreign Secretary, Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton, will be booted out by the electorate. Lord Cameron must be well aware of this and – more importantly – so are all his much-vaunted contacts.
What will substantially outlast Lord Cameron’s time in office is the life peerage bestowed on a former prime minister who had not even secured a knighthood.
John Bath
Clevedon, Somerset
SIR – For me, the most illustrious resident of Chipping Norton will always be that marvellous actor Ronnie Barker. He ran an antiques shop in the town for several years after his retirement.
Alun Harvey
Groningen, Netherlands
Debanked by Barclays
SIR – I read about Barclays closing the bank account of the Orchard Surgery in Royston (report, November 18). It did the same to our company’s account, without offering any explanation as to how or why it had made this decision.
The company – incorporated in 1938 – buys then rents flats and houses to private individuals in England. It was started by my great aunt and passed down to me and my sister.
The best the bank says it can do is to carry out an inquiry, which will take up to eight weeks. If a mistake has been made, we might then be able to open a new account.
Barclays says it will send us a cheque, made payable to the company, which we will have no means of banking unless we can open a new company account. In the meantime, our tenants can’t pay their rent and we can’t pay suppliers, including builders who are being engaged to carry out much-needed work.
Clive Sparks
Seaford, East Sussex
SIR – It is not just Barclays that is closing accounts. HSBC recently wrote to a long-standing business customer I know, giving them a date in December when their accounts would be closed, in the name of “safeguarding”.
The customer is a small family-owned business, which employs 40 staff and maintains substantial credit balances. It has banked with HSBC for 40 years and conducts all its business in the local area.
The madness of this is that the company successfully underwent a similar “safeguarding” process only two years ago, and nothing about the set-up, ownership or nature of the business has changed in the interim.
There was a time when banks competed to acquire good customers; now they seem to be outbidding each other to do the opposite.
Gerard Somers
Atherstone, Warwickshire
Menopause treatment
SIR – Thank you Eleanor Mills (Comment, November 17) for pointing out the dangerous absurdity of “talking therapy” (CBT) for women going through the menopause. I couldn’t agree with you more that it “smacks of the worst kind of medical misogyny” and a return to a Victorian view of women as hysterical.
It is insulting to portray women’s menopause symptoms as being all in the mind. It’s a physical condition, as hundreds of thousands of women – including me – will attest. I bet no women over the age of 50 were involved in this silly recommendation from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence.
Elisabeth Boss
Bath, Somerset
Butchering Wilde
SIR – Watching the Miramax version of The Importance of Being Earnest I was incensed to find that the line “When I see a spade, I call it a spade” was cut (“Trigger warnings are bad enough – but this butchery of classic films is unforgivable”, Comment, November 19).
That phrase has entered the English lexicon of pithy descriptions. How can this be allowed? Or is it just ignorance?
Alan Harpley
Scruton, North Yorkshire
Crashing Christmas
SIR – Dr Alan Thomas (Letters, November 18) talks of buying his grandson a drum kit for Christmas.
Does the good doctor not get on with his children?
Roy Bailey
Great Shefford, Berkshire
BBC’s pension plan
SIR – Your report, “BBC crisis over £1.7bn pension bill for stars”, (November 4), is incorrect and significantly inflates the BBC’s obligation to fund its defined benefit pension scheme shortfall and employer contribution rate.
The BBC’s annual report and accounts of 2022-2023 state that the most recent triennial actuarial valuation of the scheme – on April 1 2022 – shows a funding shortfall of £841 million in total. The valuation is required by law and the figure is assessed independently by a pension specialist, and has also been reviewed by the National Audit Office.
We have agreed a payment plan with the pension scheme trustee to help ensure that this shortfall is eliminated by December 2028. The plan incorporates cash payments supplemented by contingent contributions. The cash payments are £50 million annually from April 2023 to April 2027, and a payment of £38 million the following year. The contingent contributions would be payable in addition to the cash payments, based on future assessments of the funding level. Since the 2022 valuation, funding has improved. The latest interim valuation report shows that by April 1 2023 there was a small funding surplus.
The incorrect deficit contribution figure quoted by the Telegraph inflates the BBC’s obligation to fund the shortfall by more than double. Our annual reports and accounts, and the agreed recovery plan, are both publicly available.
You also report a contribution rate of 42.3 per cent of staff salary into the defined benefit scheme. The schedule of contributions agreed with the scheme trustee as part of the 2022 actuarial valuation states that the employer contribution rate for the defined benefit pension scheme is currently set at 30 per cent of members’ pensionable salaries.
The defined benefit pension scheme was closed to the BBC’s new joiners in 2010. We are awaiting a hearing at the Court of Appeal to clarify what options are available to us for the future of the scheme.
Leigh Tavaziva
Group chief operating officer, BBC
London W1
Charity coppers
SIR – Perhaps Michael Hughes (Letters, November 16) could, like many other people I know, put his unwanted change into charity boxes. It would solve his problem and help others.
Glynn Leaney
Chalgrove, Oxfordshire
The impact on pupils of politicians’ rhetoric
SIR – We have seen clearly over the past weeks how careful those in positions of power need to be about what they say. Political rhetoric can all too easily be whipped up into unintended action, with serious and occasionally violent consequences.
This is something all those working in schools wish was better understood. Schools do not exist outside society, immune from politics or the news. Children and young people are incredibly plugged in, and curious about the world around them. More often than not, it is schools and teachers who field questions and distress from pupils in response to what they have seen or heard from politicians.
It isn’t practical for these questions and concerns simply to be dismissed. Part of the fundamental purpose of education is to help prepare young people to navigate the world, to interpret and understand politics, the news and the impact it will have on them. While schools are strictly apolitical spaces, politics – in the broadest sense of the word – affects all lives and cannot be ignored.
This can put school staff and teachers in an incredibly difficult position when politicians and leaders aren’t careful about what they say, and how they say it. From the rhetoric around Israel and Gaza, to refugees and asylum seekers, transgender issues, parliamentary reshuffles and political marches – schools are regularly faced with an extraordinary range of sensitive and controversial topics that can provoke an emotional response.
Governments could do more to back schools with the practical guidance they need to navigate some of these issues, but educators are prepared to help pupils make sense of their concerns. In future, politicians must be more mindful of the impact their words have, and take better care of the language they use. It is not just potential voters hearing these words, it is children and young people too.
Paul Whiteman
General secretary, National Association of Head Teachers
London SW1
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