PLEASE send your letters (as short as you like) to info@conservativewoman.co.uk and mark them ‘Letter to the Editor’. We need your name and a county address, eg Yorkshire or London. Letters may be shortened. There is no guarantee of publication.
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No wonder there’s a child mental health crisis
Dear Editor
I don’t share Laura Perrins’s anxiety that women aren’t having enough babies. The mums I have seen (themselves part of the great social experiment which decided children are better raised by only one parent) seem to dislike their own children. Jabbering away all day on the phone but never speaking to or noticing their own child from infancy. These children start school lacking all the basic skills, as mum never got around to teaching them. Left at home in a solitary cell with only machines for company no wonder there’s a mental health crisis amongst children. If we can’t do better than this, best to go the way of the dodo.
Kathleen Carr
Sheffield
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Money for everything except our precious children
Dear Editor,
It honestly feels as if nobody cares any longer but I know that they do.
In September our babies of nine months old will be eligible for 15 hours a week free ‘minding’ by well-meaning strangers, possibly in strange surroundings.
If parents take up this offer their baby may share their ‘key worker’ with two or three other babies of the same age and with the same need for attention, possibly at the same time.
To start with the babies will scream, sometimes for ages, then they may cry before they subside. Their parents will be told that they have settled down. Could that mean given up?
Before long they will be learning to socialise and then, still unable to speak, they will ‘love’ the whole experience.
It breaks my heart.
Many mothers would rather care for their children at home, at least until they are preschool age, but are unable to afford it.
All mothers of my generation got an allowance to spend on their children as they saw fit. Why is that no longer possible? There is money for some things but not for our precious children.
To quote Nelson Mandela, ‘There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.’
Ros Simmonds
Kent
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Where are the doctors?
Dear Editor
Did you know that the necessary ‘vitals’ patients need to have checked before major surgery are hardly carried out by doctors any more? So many operations are cancelled a day because it appears that allied medical representatives are taking on these very important duties. If anything at all is missed, the operation can be forfeited. Mistakes happen. But that’s thousands and thousands down the drain every time for the NHS – where are all the doctors?
Ed Furrough
Ely, Cambridgeshire
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The scandal of Huw Edwards’s pay
Dear Editor
Huw Edwards, the BBC’s highest-paid newsreader, is still being paid his £439,000 salary despite being suspended in July 2023. Why should licence-payers be forced to pay a licence fee which is then used to subsidise his suspension? As from yesterday, the rate of Statutory Sick Pay is £116.75 a week. If is good enough for the masses, it should be good enough for Huw Edwards. The government should legislate to reduce the BBC licence fee every year until zero.
Clark Cross
Linlithgow
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Message on a phone screen
Dear Editor
If you know someone is looking at your phone whilst you are getting off/on a train or when they get out of their seat and have to look in your direction, you make sure your phone is showing a particular article you do not mind them seeing – I call it headline nudging. As they get up you notice out of the corner of your eye that they read it . . . maybe it’s not a big deal but it definitely plants a seed.
Getting off a train with someone in a mask a while back, I Ieft a Daily Sceptic article in full view on my screen. It depicted the idiocy of mask-wearing: a flock of sheep were all standing to attention staring at the reader donning face nappies. I could see the passenger who had looked over shuffling uncomfortably and feeling like a fool.
Simon Davis