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

Pensioners should march like trade unions

I am an 80-year-old recently widowed pensioner.

Instead of us pensioners writing to our local Member of Parliament, I believe we could achieve more by all able-bodied pensioners marching on Downing Street or the Houses of Parliament.

Unions march for more money, why not pensioners?

I believe we have right on our side regarding the loss of the winter fuel payment and the fact that a large number of us who have a small private pension are having almost half of it taken away a month to pay tax.

My private pension is roughly £168 per month. I have just received a letter from HMRC to say my tax per month is now £80 per month! Where is the justice in that?

Pensioners should take the matter into their own hands and march. I for one would certainly be there.

Helen Ward

Government does not care about the elderly

Who are Labour now, just a branch of the Conservatives?

Who is this so-called leader of our once proud country? He is not for the people who put him there, he cares for no one over 60.

There are people that have worked hard for this country because we believed that in our old age, with our taxes paid, we would be taken care of in our old age. What a mistake that's turned out to be.

If the country needs sorting out financially, why are we still funding abroad at the expense of our own people?

There will be more older people in hospital this winter; more people will die in their homes from the cold and illness from the effect of being cold.

Shame on this Labour government and all the lies and U-turns.

Ean Magee

Who looks after our rights?

The words written by R. J. Brooks echo thousands of us pensioners (letters last week).

Why are the powers that be not listening to our words?

We cannot claim 'benefits' BECAUSE we worked, paid our NHS and saved towards the ever-increasing retirement costs. We will have to struggle and 'pull our belts in' again.

Won't someone stand up for us - where are our rights?

Ann Stevens

Migrant landings distract from wider problem

I totally concur with Malcolm Hayes letter about a need for transparency on immigration. The debate is usually so toxic and views, on both sides, are often based on fake news and misinformation.

It understandably angers UK taxpayers that we are spending a small fortune to keep migrants in hotels, etc, when millions are just about managing and services are being cut everywhere.

The estimated 29,000 people who arrived by boat last year, however, are a mere drop in the ocean and a distraction from a much bigger issue: the UK government let in hundreds of thousands of LEGAL migrants last year - and 685,000 more people arrived than left.

Whilst many of those arriving were non-working dependents (which has now been restricted) a huge number are employed to do the jobs (paying tax and NI) in sectors where there are chronic shortages of UK applicants (eg: health and care workers).

The plain fact is that, in the UK, we have an ageing population and a plummeting birth rate (which will lead to fewer people of working age). Under the current system, where the workers of today pay the state pension of those eligible recipients, we need more workers to pay tax and NI so that pensioners can rightly receive what they have contributed to all their working lives.

If successive governments are going to allow the population to explode like this then THEY have a duty to sort out the problem. If they don't provide more housing, schools and GP places, etc, don't allow them to blame immigrants who arrived here legally for all the ensuing issues.

M. Davies

Vital role of immigrants in healthcare

Thank you Marika Sherwood for your timely reminder about the NHS’s dependence on immigrant carers.

The largest employer in Western Europe has depended on immigrants since its inception. In the 1950s and 1960s these immigrants were whites coming from Ireland, Italy or Spain. However, by the 1970s the NHS had no option but to recruit non-white carers from Malaysia, Mauritius, Sri Lanka, West Indies and the African continent. About 80% of the latter group were channelled into the Cinderella services, to work with people with learning disabilities, mental health problems or the elderly.

I was one of them and worked in a 1,400-bed hospital doing a contracted 4×13 hours shift per week plus an extra day overtime to cover for the chronic shortage of direct carers. I earned £10 after deductions for 65 hours working week.

Conditions may have improved in NHS but the dependency on immigrant carers remains a significant factor. Thanks to the NHS, people in the UK are now living longer and the direct correlation between old age and healthcare consumption means such reliance on a critical mass of immigrant carers will persist.

To those who rant about immigrants lengthening the NHS waiting list, etc, please note nowadays you are more likely to be looked after by a Filipino, Indian or Eastern European carer than to see one standing in front of you in the patients’ waiting queue.

L. Roger Numas

NHS difficulties will only get worse

Marika Sherwood asks where the hospitals would be without the mass immigration which so many of us oppose.

Clearly she must view the world through rose-tinted spectacles if she believes those arriving by boat, and the dependents of those accompanying students, are all qualified medical professionals, rushing off to help the NHS.

Of course, properly qualified medical staff may be admitted where there is a problem with recruitment but this should be controlled and is anyway not the answer to the failures of the health service.

For many years the vast sums provided to health trusts have been completely wasted on an army of bureaucrats, the bulk of whom contribute nothing to the actual task of helping the sick, but produce endless regulations which just obstruct the genuine efforts of doctors and nurses.

In addition, the absurd insistence that all nurses must have university degrees is not only an insult to all those who in the past worked, for what they regarded as a vocation, and did not require spending years at university, but is also preventing those youngsters, who not wish to build up enormous debts, but feel a calling, from being able to serve.

The only solution to the collapsing health service is a root and branch reform, which would direct the vast sums available to front-line work, not back-room pen pushers.

However, with a government which believes the opposite, matters will only get worse.

Colin Bullen

Calling concerns ‘far right’ won’t help

As regards the government’s reaction to the riots (blaming everything on the nebulous ‘far right’), Dave Wilson has accused me of the misdemeanour of ‘paucity of thinking’, partly because I referred to the Prime Minister as ‘Keir Stalin’.

May I politely suggest he amends his regrettable tendency to insult those who disagree with him?

The hyperbolic ‘Keir Stalin’ reference might almost be seen as appropriate. I refer to Starmer’s intention, as a former prosecutor and authoritarian zealot, to restrict freedom of expression and to have people who make idiotic comments on the web, and elsewhere, imprisoned.

We’re told that this summer’s rioters were whipped up into a frenzy by the keyboard-wielding agitators. This prompts the question: what caused rioting in previous decades - the poll tax riots for example?

While the recent violent criminality of the riots should be condemned, other instances of serious criminality are usually swept under the carpet by the political establishment and by most of the national media - the annual festival of crime known as the Notting Hill Carnival providing a pertinent example. With two violence-induced deaths at this year’s event, the usual ’sweeping under the carpet’ operation is not so easy.

I somehow doubt the arrested suspects will be dealt with half as quickly as the rioters were - if most of them are dealt with at all.

This society is in many respects standing on its head, and it doesn’t know where its feet are. Dismissing those who are appalled by this development and by other indicators of terminal decline as ‘far right’ is not going to help.

David Topple

Double standards over protests

During the Black Lives Matter protests, when a violent career criminal resisted arrest in America, people took to the streets in England.

There was no sign of the police or riot shields, they were left to pull down statues and defile our monuments. Sir Keir Starmer bent the knee in support.

Now when English men take to the streets to protest about what is happening in their neighbourhoods, the police are deployed in force with a wall of riot shields.

The protesters are called thugs, extra courts are convened overnight to prosecute them and they are sent to jail for throwing a plastic vape cartridge, or pouring a bottle of water over somebody.

Talk about two-tier Starmer. This man has more faces than a town hall clock.

Alan Hardie-Storey

Teach children critical thinking at school

Why is there such a fetish around ‘times tables’?

Teachers’ leaders have, quite rightly, called for an end to the excessive testing of young children, including an end to table testing.

Mathematics is an amazing subject which pupils of all ages can enjoy and benefit from, providing it is taught correctly and with due regard to the abilities of the pupils.

All pupils and students need to understand the structures of numbers, shapes and relationships. By helping them to do this, they also learn how to critically assess other systems and structures.

The reason why those on authority stress times tables is because it is the clearest form of rote learning. Our education system is designed to force children into conformity with the prevailing form of modern society.

What is actually needed is a structure that enables all children to think creatively. To learn, by activities, from the world around them.

Critical thinking leads to questioning and a refusal to accept things which they do not understand and which are contrary to their own experiences.

We need to trust our young people and to encourage their teachers, at all levels, to develop all those latent abilities which reside in the minds of our young people.

Ralph A. Tebbutt

End stigma around hearing aids

Hearing aids can bring life-changing benefits for millions of people with hearing loss. But new research from RNID, the charity supporting people who are deaf, have hearing loss or tinnitus, has revealed the depth of stigma that surrounds them.

Nearly half (47%) of the general public said hearing aids haven't been accepted by society in the way that glasses have and 11% said they would even prefer to live with hearing loss than wear hearing aids. Shockingly, our research found that more than one in three people (34%) would try to hide hearing aids if they needed them.

At RNID, we want to challenge these damaging perceptions. Hearing aids in the UK – whether accessed through the NHS or bought privately – are all digital. They contain advanced technology to make listening easier, allowing you to enjoy everyday sounds, keep up with conversations and even stream phone calls or podcasts directly through Bluetooth.

Hearing aids benefit people of all ages and backgrounds. It’s essential that we leave negative attitudes behind and celebrate hearing aids for the amazing, life changing devices they are for millions of people in the UK.

Franki Oliver, audiology manager at RNID