Our readers from across the county give their weekly take on the biggest issues impacting Kent and beyond.

Some letters refer to past correspondence which can be found by clicking here. Join the debate by emailing letters@thekmgroup.co.uk

Don’t judge people by older standards

I have to take issue with two letter-writers complaining about how 'Many people don't live within their means' and 'Bad parenting is often to blame'.

These are both typical examples of 'punching down': having a go at those less fortunate than themselves. Why assume that young, struggling individuals and families don't know how to look after themselves properly and that they are spoilt because they need stuff to survive in the modern world which these people didn't have?

I note that one of these writers is 80 and the other is 89. I am 69 so not far short but I grew up in a time when we had everything incredibly easy. Education was free. Many families could afford a house and to feed their family, and possibly the odd holiday, on one salary alone.

We had a fully functioning NHS (which included eye care, hearing, dentistry, etc). We knew about pollution and its threat to the climate and the environment - the hole in the ozone layer was fixed and we assumed that things would get better. We were becoming aware of the dangers of plastics and the overuse of timber leading to habitat loss for many wildlife species.

Our public services were just that, and certainly better maintained than they are now - with sewage pumped into rivers and sea on a regular basis – with Royal Mail being efficient.

We also understood, I think, about inequality; I was a second-wave feminist and knew that my struggle for equality would not be valid unless it was also a fight for equality for all marginalised folk.

Please, think carefully about what you assume. Look up at the enormous profits being made in privatised industries (on which we rely for clean water, electricity, gas - not to mention our food).

The differential between what an employee and their bosses took home in the 60s was relatively small; now it is vast. No one should be a billionaire while those around them starve.

Mary Kerr

Times have changed since the 60s

Jean Rolfe’s letter last week takes issue with “people who don’t know what real poverty is” and refers to her youth when there was no Netflix.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has various definitions of poverty, which are all relative to the UK today (absolute income disparity being one such measure). It reports that one in five people in the UK is thus classed as being “in poverty” and incredibly, over 1m children in the UK are classed as “destitute” – not being able to afford shelter, food, clothing.

Children experience the highest rate of poverty in the country too, at three in 10. Pensioners have the lowest rate. Clearly there are exceptions – there are poor old people too - but the reason for that disparity is simple.

If we imagine 80-year-old Mrs Rolfe left home in her 20s, it would have been the mid-60s. The average house price then was just over £2,000, and the average wage was around £700, making a house worth just under 3x salary.

Today’s UK average house price is £300,000 and the average wage is around £35,000 (9 x salary) and in the South East it’s skewed even more than that. Average rents and mortgage costs locally are well above £2,000 a month.

Netflix costs £10.99 a month.

There is nothing wrong with taking comfort in the thought that people can drop their subscription TV and feed their children but the evidence says otherwise.

Chris Denham

Families forced into poverty by low incomes

I would take issue with the recent letter writers who blame ‘bad parenting’ as the major cause to explain why so many of our children are going to school hungry and unwashed.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s report, UK Poverty 2024, said that nearly three in 10 children are growing up in poverty. In fact, from 1994 children have consistently had the highest poverty rates, while pensioners along with working adults without children, now have the lowest.

The fact is that these children are experiencing daily hunger which can significantly impact their concentration, behaviour and ability to learn in school. This has nothing to do with parents neglecting to fed them properly, but everything to do with fact that there isn’t enough money in the family budget to feed them properly.

In the cost of living crisis with which families have to cope, food poverty has gone hand-in-hand with hygiene poverty with children arriving at school not only hungry but also in unwashed clothes, with unwashed hair and unbrushed teeth.

It is simply the fact that low income families struggle with the cost of things like washing machines, energy bills and new clothes and are forced into hygiene poverty because they are caught between being able to either, heat their home, buy food or keep clean. For their children the result can be dramatic with low self-esteem, being isolated or “left out” by others in class, having issues with mental health and going absent from school.

Alison Garnham, leader of the Child Poverty Action Group put her finger on it when she said: “Children are facing a barrage of worries instead of experiencing the magic of childhood. This is no way for a child to grow up”.

John Cooper

Make rubbish disposal easier to end dumping

Linda Hill is right to highlight once agaiin the scourge of fly-tipping, which is difficult to police because it happens in isolated areas when nobody is watching.

Catching litterers in town is, of course, much easier; but to be fair, litter wardens cannot be in every lane or at every farm gate to catch fly-tippers and if they were there the tippers would simply go elsewhere.

The problem could be eased if we were to take advantage of our exit from the EU and frame our own recycling and waste rules.

Much of the waste that we see dumped is not that of some householder frustrated that his bin hasn't been collected, it’s commercial or semi-commercial waste dumped to avoid the dumper having to pay charges to dispose of it properly, small builders, house clearance, that kind of thing.

What we need to dump in a ditch are the rules that we inherited from the EU that require we charge for waste disposal with set recycling targets; if rubbish could be dumped for free there would be no incentive to dump it in country lanes and the environment would benefit, even if we had to pay a few pence extra on our Council Tax bills.

Bob Britnell

Privatisation of utilities has failed taxpayers

It would appear from the media consensus backed up by massive polling evidence that the Conservatives have hit such a critically low ebb that the decent and patriotic thing to do would be to call a general election.

This decline from an overwhelming majority in 2019 can be put down to events: the economic stagnation, the decline of public services such as the NHS and police, the parties in Downing Street, the contracts for mates and the irresponsible Truss budget.

But there are deeper causes for this decline, a growing realisation that much of the dogma of the last 40 years is just wrong.

The best example is the consequence of excessive privatisation of our water industry. It was supposed to liberalise investment and create a shareholding democracy. What we have instead is a failing model and the fouling of our rivers and coastlines.

Investment in the industry since the 1990s is down 15%; £72bn has been paid out in dividends in an industry that is 70% owned by foreign corporations. Water bills have risen by 363%. In short we, as consumers, are being ripped off to satisfy an industry that is characterised as greedy and incompetent.

As privatisation fails the taxpayer picks up the cost and liability. The state takes back ownership as a sticking plaster not as a planned service for the consumer.

We need a new approach to these essential public utilities, one that is in the public interest, not in the interest of avaricious capitalists.

Roger Truelove, Labour Party

Party leaflet has cheered me up

It’s been a long, damp dreary winter and I was feeling a bit low this week.

But relief came from an unlikely source: the Reform Party leaflet. It’s great! We’re going to have lower taxes, cheaper energy, better transport, 40,000 more police officers and increased defence spending.

And they have a plan to pay for all this. Stop wasting money on climate change; that we’re on the road to extinction is a fiction. Don’t take the word of climate scientists, the evidence of your own senses or those discarded thermals. The best insights come from real experts, a property investor and a commodity trader I met down the pub.

And there’s more: any jobseeker who hasn’t found a job within four months will, along with his wife and kids, just starve. Think of the savings there!

As for illegal immigrants, Reform has solved it. We put them in a boat, sail back to France and dump them on the beaches. I’m sure the French navy, the gendarmerie and the 30 or 40 would-be immigrants will all cooperate. Why has no one thought of this before?

And I bet they hatched these cunning schemes just in time for “last orders”.

I can’t wait for the Lib Dem leaflet to arrive. They can be relied upon to produce some excellent stuff, particularly after a few bottles of Prosecco. I wonder what they’ll have us believe this year. Cheers!

Alf Archer

We must show leadership over climate

For a supposedly educated man, Mr Bullen remains completely in denial over man-made climate change.

Would he go to his doctor and say that a serious diagnosis was "only a theory"? I rather think not.

Incidentally, he must also have been highly angered by the European Court of Human Rights handing down a decision that climate inaction breaches people’s rights. That includes mine and, like it or not, his own!

Yes, some other much larger countries still have greater emissions and fossil fuels but such as China are also making large investments in renewables, though need to do much more. Mr Putin would be well advised to ditch the Ukraine war and send troops to deal with the likely climate-caused floods across southern Russia right now.

Here, it's about showing leadership, so why should we ease off?

Ray Duff

Liberal elite support enemies of the West

The priorities of the vast majority of MPs and peers, are first themselves, secondly their party and lastly the nation.

They subscribe to globalist beliefs, which reject the idea of national borders, while putting the interests of international organisations ahead of those of their own people.

The result is that nothing the ordinary person cares about.

Our infrastructure is on the point of collapse under the pressure of an influx of arrivals from abroad, making such matters as providing enough housing impossible, yet these dolts do not care.

Instead they constantly seek to abide by the demands of supranational organisations such as the EU and the UN, or bow to the supposed great and the good, concerning what the latter deem to be international law.

That a majority of the current Cabinet oppose leaving the ECHR makes clear that they put this undemocratic body ahead of our democracy. On the wider stage the deplorable intervention by some members of the legal profession concerning the war in Gaza is heavily biased against Israel, largely ignoring the crimes of Hamas.

As always one can depend upon the liberal elite to take the side of the enemies of the West and to fail the people at home.

Despite their claims to knowing best they should be ignored and removed from the positions of influence they do not deserve, or else our state will indeed totter and fall.

Colin Bullen

Tech is taking over our lives

Another bank closure because of online banking. Why? Because of the unrelenting, unstoppable invasion of every walk of life by technology, the use of which is responsible for the way all businesses and their employees are having to change work practices.

I fear the tech revolution is going to be as bad for the majority as the industrial revolution was and still is. The industrialists and the tech companies become very rich and the workers’ quality of life becomes poorer.

Will we ever be able to break this cycle? Who knows.

The irony of these changes is that all the banks are transferring the services they used to provide to the Post Offices. I don't really need to explain what has happened to Post Office owners.

I asked the bank if paper statements were going to continue to be sent. The extraordinary reply was yes, but we are trying to cut back on paper usage for the sake of the environment.

They don't seem to realise that the production and use of all the gadgets is costing the planet on which we live.

Anne Bacon