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How does Priti Patel plan exactly to push the old, sick and disabled back into work?

REUTERS
REUTERS

Those Project Fear, scaremongering Remainers are at it again! This time they are asserting that implementation of the proposed immigration regulations will ultimately lead to a severe shortage of care workers.

Can these pessimists not understand that when Priti Patel has cajoled the old, sick, disabled and other incapable elements of the eight million economically inactive back into work there won’t be a need for so many care workers?

Ron Dawson
Dorset

The skilled and hard-working

Apart from Priti Patel, the other economically illiterate Iain Duncan Smith was talking on the radio blaming business for its overreliance on immigration and its failure to train Brits. He gave an example of setting up a scheme to train lorry drivers rather than employ immigrant drivers whilst he ran the Department for Work and Pensions. He said it was a success in terms of being oversubscribed and with a 85 per cent success rate.

Presumably it could not have been a Brits-only course which would have been discriminatory, so how many European immigrants made up the cohort?

He further argued that immigrants caused a log jam as too many Brits stayed on an entry-level salary rather than progressing. Could it have anything to do with the state of the economy or even because of the merit of hard-working, skilled European immigrants? What was his evidence?

Maurizio Moore
Essex

Blairites Unite

Sean O’Grady looks into the dark Blair glass and wonders when socialists will learn to love Blair. The popular view is that Tony Blair continued Thatcherism by other means, and took the UK into a war of aggression which caused hundreds of thousands of deaths.

On the other hand, his government brought in Scottish devolution thereby enhancing democracy, and also brought hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty.

Nothing is simple. Blair was certainly better than the cardboard cut-outs currently in power.

Steve Bordwell
Edinburgh

Watery hope

The more I see the power of water in Britain’s rivers and tributaries, the more I question why we are not investing in hydro-electric schemes? In the future we will need more electricity, and with global warming we will get plenty more rain. Do we have no engineers or scientists among our ministers and their advisers?

D Waddington
Ringwood

European identity

You’ve probably heard about the Stay European campaign. I’m supportive of this and encouraged by the momentum that’s growing around it.

It is wrong to reduce British people’s citizenship in the false belief that we are winning back sovereignty when in reality our lives are controlled as much by corporate interests as they are by domestic governments.

The EU, though far from perfect, provides an extra level of democratic protection for its citizens and I’m hopeful that full EU citizenship or, failing that, associate citizenship can be retained for UK residents or at the very least those UK residents who sign up for it. I am disappointed and angry that neither I nor my family will be able to continue to travel, live and work freely throughout the EU.

Paul Sinnadurai
Powys

I always have a healthy disregard for so called “experts”.

The latest to come up on my radar is Professor Neil Ferguson, with his comments that it is not absurd to estimate that the virus could cause 400,000 deaths in the UK.

As a scientist I have looked at the figures from the China outbreak. Death per number infected is about 3 per cent, however if you look at outcome, ie, the number of deaths compared to numbers recovered, it is more like 10 per cent. No one will know the true death rate until the outbreak has finished.

Taking the worst-case scenario of a 10 per cent death rate, that would mean Professor Ferguson estimates 4 million cases of infection in the UK. China currently has 76,000 cases, but our expert is suggesting that 50 times that number of cases in the UK is not absurd.

I rest my case on the reason to disregard expert advice.

Susan Powell
Hereford

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