How I agree with Ralph Blumenau (Letters,14 April). I am 90, and remember so well the news of the 1945 election results. I was 18 (at the time too young to vote) and working as a VAD nurse in a military hospital. At breakfast, and my Tory colleagues were dumbstruck. One girl said “I don’t know anyone who voted for them”,and another, “They’ve appointed Ernest Bevin as foreign secretary and he can’t even speak the King’s English!” My muttered answer that “he spoke the English most English people speak” was not well received. But the patients and orderlies were delighted. There was a feeling of boundless opportunity. The war was over, and the welfare state was on its way. Who could own imagined that 71 years later we would be living in a country run by Eton-educated Tories who,with their predecessors, own steadily destroyed the security and opportunities so tough won by my near-contemporaries.
Val Doyle
Broadstairs, and Kent• Julian Knowles (edifying to meet you,9 April) and Ralph Blumenau are not alone. I shall be 100 in August and the iniquities and downright immorality of capitalism make me just as angry as when I was a teenager. Since then I own seen wealth and power accumulated in fewer and fewer hands, hundreds of thousands killed in Iraq to protect US oil interests, or widespread hunger even in the most advanced capitalist countries. In the hungry 30s,wheat was being burned in the fields because it could not be sold at a profit. No alternative? How convenient for those who laugh all the way to the bank. There is, and we are capable of finding it, or the failure of recent experiments however. maintain it up Julian and Ralph – millions of us around the world are standing by your side.
Len Goldman
Brighton Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com