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We need your name and a county address, e.g. Yorkshire or London. Letters may be shortened. There is no guarantee of publication.
Letter of the week
Dear Editor
I’m at Lord’s watching Day 3 of England v India. The last ball of the 95th over and first ball of the 97th, both bowled by England captain Ben Stokes, were no balls because there were three fielders behind square on the leg side.
Neither were called by tue onfield international, professional umpures. (Belatedly, the England balcony signalled to the fielders.)
Please don’t tell me to trust experts.
Yours sincerely
Ian Tanner,
NW8
Put your turbines where your mouth is, MPs
Dear Editor
Ed Miliband wants to relax rules allowing homeowners to have small wind turbines in their gardens. This is such a good idea that MPs should trial the idea. I’m sure having several nice and close to their actual dwelling will show them what a boon these turbines will be to family and neighbourly relations .
Kathleen Carr
Sheffield
Frog in the throat, your majesty?
Dear Editor
King Charles wanted to impress and extend a courtesy at the Windsor Castle banquet by speaking a few lines in French as he hosted Macron and others from across the Channel. He largely, though, addressed the room in English. Did anyone notice that when Macron stood up, he spent an awfully long time speaking in (fluent and fast) French. It seemed quite rude. Also, how many were able to follow what he was saying?
Bill Kenwright
London
A windy divide
Dear Editor
Mr Miliband is pushing for more wind farms in the South, where land values are high. But the highest average wind speeds are generally found in the North and West, particularly in Scotland.
So presumably, he has compared the O&M costs – including line power losses – of the North/South options. That is to see if the lower southern wind power value is outweighed by the lower wind power in the South?
He also needs to grasp that it doesn’t matter how many subsidised wind and solar farms he builds, if there is not circa 80GW of gas turbine and nuclear power available by the early ‘30s to keep the lights on, when wind and solar intensity is near zero for several days.
Roger J. Arthur
Hollybank
The GMC, protecting the narrative
Dear Editor
On the first page of its website, the General Medical Council (GMC) makes the following claim:
‘We work with doctors, physician associates and anaesthesia associates to support good, safe patient care across the UK’.
As TCW reported last week, this body struck off a doctor for exercising his judgement in deciding on appropriate treatment for a patient. A vaccine exemption certificate was issued because he judged it the correct course of action. Any good doctor should do what he feels is best for the patient following discussion.
It seems that with little medical skill and no patient consultation, the GMC has decided that supporting good safe patient care is about enforcing diktats on how doctors can work and what they can say.
People are not aware that vaccines are approved without placebo balanced trials as it is ‘unethical’ to let a patient believe that they are ‘protected’ if they are not. Reporting adverse effects depends almost entirely on reports from doctors post vaccination. When doctors are warned or threatened for trying to report these problems, the only safeguard of the vaccination programme is destroyed.
The GMC has a history going back many decades of crushing any dissent. The procedure of attacking non-compliant doctors was refined around 30 years ago when Andrew Wakefield was struck off for raising honest and legitimate concerns about the triple vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella being associated with a rise in infant autism. That he never claimed causation was never stated. Following three decades of this use, the surge in autistic children is obvious and studies are now needed to ‘find the cause’. Perhaps if they had accepted the possibility of a problem, we might not be in the current disaster. Is this how the GMC ‘works with doctors to support good safe patient care’, by ruthlessly silencing legitimate concerns?
One might expect that the constitution of this body would include high levels of medical expertise, but that would be wrong. When medical evidence is ignored or deemed inadmissible at a tribunal, it raises the concern that good, safe patient care has little or nothing to do with the GMC. That most doctors choose to keep quiet about concerns out of fear of repercussion and the loss of a career destroys any hope that patient safety has any place within the GMC beyond the first page of a website.
From my personal point of view, they have destroyed any and all trust that I had in the medical industry in the UK. I actively avoid any medical visits outside of emergencies because doctors are not free to speak the truth. The General Medical Council and their responses (and lack of) to numerous complaints are the sole reason for this destruction of trust. They have brought the profession into disrepute and need to be disbanded and replaced before any recovery is possible.
J Tumilty
County Durham
A subsidised black hole
Dear Editor
The wind and solar industries are stretching the realms of credibility when they say that ‘renewables are unquestionably cheaper than fossil fuels’. That is not correct. The wind industry gets billions of pounds of subsidies every year from Constraint Payments, the Contracts for Difference (CfD), the Renewables Obligation Scheme (RO), and the Capacity Market and Warm Home Discount – these were quietly added to electricity bills of domestic homes and businesses.
Constraint payments are expected to increase from £1.5billion in 2024 to £1.8billion in 2025. Up to August 2024, the CfD scheme has levied £8.9billion. For one year (2023/2024), the RO sucked £4.6billion from consumers. The relatively new Capacity Market and Warm Home discount subsidies have added tens of millions of pounds to electricity bills so far. Emma Pinchbeck, Chief Executive of the Climate Change Committee, is suggesting that these subsidies are transferred to gas bills, thus artificially inflating the price of gas so people are forced to change to electricity. And we all thought Ed Miliband was mad.
Clark Cross
Linlithgow
