Budget debate, slave trade – your letters, plus rally memories at Weston Park

Apologise to the working classes

If I had the chance to speak to King Charles, I would tell him not to apologise for the slave trade on my behalf. I would also tell Andy Burnham not to apologise for the slave trade on my behalf.

A lot has been made of this country gaining great wealth from the slave trade, but the truth is that a very small number of people gained great wealth from this disgusting trade.

During the height of the slave trade, families like mine were living in conditions you would not allow an animal to live in. Working-class people during this period were dying of starvation. Disease was also killing countless thousands. Men and women, and young children, were being worked to death, and those who survived went home to hardly any food and disease-ravaged properties, where death among young children was so common it was looked on as the norm.

You may see the great country homes of England preserved by the National Trust, but you will not see the dreadful properties the working class lived in – the people who suffered while the very rich lived in splendour.

So, if King Charles wishes to make an apology, I will accept it on behalf of my ancestors. Andy Burnham, a working-class hero, might also want to apologise on behalf of past governments that never did enough to help relieve the misery of working-class people.

John Green, Shropshire

Budget was the least effective

I do not hold politicians in high regard; in my view, they make substantial promises but routinely deliver very little. I must say, however, that the latest budget was the least effective in my lifetime in addressing the needs of this nation and its people. With the national debt having exceeded £3 trillion, one would expect a credible plan to address this ticking time bomb, which affects mortgages, credit, and potential investment.

Instead, we received nothing of substance. With the total welfare bill now approaching £400 billion and continuing to rise, one might reasonably expect considerable scope for savings and efficiencies.

However, no such measures were introduced. Instead, Healey took no meaningful steps to restrain benefit spending and deferred departmental efficiency savings until the final two years of the Parliament.

This is a paper exercise with little practical significance: anyone who believes that Labour backbenchers will accept spending cuts at all should think again.

Starmer attempted to introduce the most modest benefit cuts, amounting to £12 billion – far less than was needed – but even this was unacceptable to Labour's MPs.

This is a national emergency. Britain is not, as some suggest, a “rich” country; we are unproductive, overtaxed, and increasingly inclined towards idleness. We are passing on a toxic inheritance, living beyond our means, and repeatedly failing to take meaningful action to change our circumstances.

Healey is the second Chancellor in my lifetime to bear that surname. He is evidently intent on doing as much harm as, if not more than, his namesake did in 1976. Labour has always been economically illiterate; this government is profoundly misguided and unfit to govern. It should leave office as soon as possible. We need a government prepared to tell the truth and do what is necessary. The situation could not be more urgent. We are on a precipice, with Burnham pretending that the answer lies back in the EU! A dwindling trade bloc experiencing widespread civil unrest is no answer to the crisis we have created for ourselves.

Martin Bristow, West Midlands

Ant and Dec’s song is mocking

​Having seen Ant and Dec’s hilarious mocking of Christmas via their scatological rewriting of the song, The Twelve Days of Christmas, are we going to see, in the interests of equality and diversity, a similar mocking of the festivals of Eid and Diwali? No? I didn’t think so.

Alan Jones, Midlands

Less Iron and more Rubber

In those heady 1980s days, we had the Iron Lady. Recently, an imposter appeared on the political scene, claiming that Lefties can, in fact, adopt a hard line on benefits for migrants, both legal and illegal. Unfortunately, she turns tail and runs away at the first whiff of a Rayner aimed in her direction. The Iron Lady Shabana Mahmood turns out to be a very flexible indeed Rubber Lady.

Alan M Etheridge, Midlands

My robot fears are coming true

When I was a schoolboy in the early 1950s, I said that one day mankind would be wiped out by robots, and they said I was mad!

Now, however, the world's leading experts on AI, Artificial Intelligence, not Artificial Insemination (of cattle) as some think it is – have expressed the same fear, that manmade robots will kill off all the people within a decade, unless the plug is pulled on this nightmare scenario before it is too late.

Was I so wrong 70 years ago?

W F Kerswell, Picklescott

Christmas blues

Every year I become increasingly depressed by the early onset of Christmas and the obscene money-making that comes with it. It won’t change, but it is none the less shocking.

Martin Davis, Shifnal

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