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

Education for profit is letting pupils down

Your feature on fears over schools mergers highlighted the unseemly competition for pupils by Academy chains here in Kent, as elsewhere.

The Department for Education has revealed figures showing how these "not for profit" businesses, so-called Trusts, are creaming off the cash for childrens' education, to pay their "administrators".

In the days when Kent County Council ran its 700 schools, they did well, with enough to provide multiple support services for pupils, parents and teachers and the locally elected governors who were in charge of them.

Look at the muddle we have now. The money now funds Trust CEOs and "school Leaders" to the tune of £150K, with over 60 trusts in the survey paying leaders £200K+ (the highest reported is £345,000 for a one-school trust)

It is little wonder that the latest attainment survey of schools found that 93% of maintained (local authority) schools were rated by Ofsted Good or Outstanding, compared with 87% of Academies.

You can't economize on education just to make a buck for the bosses.

It's time parents woke up to what's going on in schools and where their taxes are going.

Children deserve better. They are not just a business opportunity.

Alan Davis

Give government a chance on NHS and energy

First we had Lauren Abbott putting the boot into the government over energy prices and the following week we have Robert Boddy taking a swipe.

Both do so by making shallow digs that don’t explore much sitting behind the issues they raise.

Lauren Abbott failed to explore how high energy prices are particularly driven by our reliance on gas to generate electricity. With the war in Ukraine raging on, despite prices not close to their 2022 peak, they are still very high and hitting us all. It’s not something you can lay at the door of a government that’s been in office for nine months.

The failure of the last government to really drive up secure domestic energy left us massively exposed from our reliance on Russian gas. What the new government has got to work doing is attracting significant investment in domestic renewable electricity production to create greater energy security and to work towards their ambition of cutting energy bills by 2030.

Bizarrely Robert Boddy seems bothered by the government highlighting the vast increase in NHS appointments when comparing the recent period with the previous period dogged by strikes in the NHS.

This government successfully ended that industrial action and all users of NHS services have benefited as a result - without that we’d all be far worse off, with more cancelled appointments and longer delays with diagnoses and treatments.

Ashley Wise

Farage won’t offer anything new

Reform UK have decided to have a little internecine war. This is, of course, very amusing, a spat in which most observers will be wishing everyone would lose.

They’ve since lost one of their five MPs, Rupert Lowe, who’s had the whip withdrawn. Meanwhile, parliamentary Reform UK retains the services of the chap who got a conviction for assaulting his girlfriend.

Since the election, the heavily defeated British conservative establishment has been pumping up Reform UK as the solution to the huge policy and personal failings of the unlamented, fast-disappearing Conservative party.

As the Tory party recedes into overdue oblivion, its even harder-right spawn, Reform UK, are being primed to take its place by the right-wing media. These are the same organs that promoted the long list of national failures over the past decade: austerity, Brexit, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss.

Anyone paying attention knows that any party belonging to self-publicist Nigel Farage has none of the required qualities to be an opposition, let alone govern. Reform UK’s policy platform is 14 years of Tory disaster plus Liz Truss on steroids.

We know that since Keir Starmer’s sloppy start to governing the country, including the disastrous Winter Fuel Allowance announcement, Reform has picked up council seats and moved solidly ahead of the Tories in the polls, even topping them outright in some surveys.

So I am left to wonder what these voters think would happen differently if this motley crew got close to power?

Ben Murphy

Liberal revival sparked by Trump arrogance

The contemptuous treatment of the brave Ukrainian people by Trump and Vance is setting back the conservative cause across Europe, the UK and Canada.

Whereas the excesses of the woke ideology and the failure of liberal governments to control immigration had meant that parties of the centre right were very likely to take power in most of these countries within the next few years, it now seems possible that they will see their support fall away, as electorates react to the arrogance of the Republicans in the US by turning back to liberal politicians.

We have already seen the Liberal party in Canada, apparently due for certain defeat, revive, while opinion polls in many countries show a decisive reversal of voting intentions.

Support for Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour government had significantly declined since the general election, but his handling of the issues of Ukraine, and defence, has led to a meaningful change in the polls.

If he is able to face down the Left, and actually achieve what he declares he wants, he may restore his party’s fortunes.

It is doubtful that Trump intended that his actions should have these results, but his disregard for the interests of any country but his own is so blatant, and so deplorable, he may find that he has fatally undermined the conservative cause in the Western world, something he may come to regret in the future.

He has clearly forgotten that actions have consequences, and that, as it says in the Bible “you reap what you sow”.

Colin Bullen

Pure socialism ends with dictatorship

In my original letter on the subject of the Nazis being socialists, I suggested that the clue was in the names, The National Socialist Democratic Workers Party and I followed that with a series of examples of how the Nazis governed in a socialist manner.

John Cantello (March 6), Kevin Power and Dr MacDonald (March 13) then attacked that view but focussed only on the issue of ‘socialist’ in the name of the party. What none of them did was to examine or undermine my central thesis that in power the Nazis governed as socialist in an almost indistinguishable manner to the socialists of the Soviet Union.

My basic point was not addressed, that for socialism to be realised, it must end in tyranny as in its purest form there can be no room for dissent and thus inevitably it ends as a dictatorship; read Orwell's 1984.

One of the lessons to be learned is a riposte to those like Anita Dow (March 13) who call for a proportional representation electoral system; after all the NSDAP never had a working majority in the Reichstag but Hitler still became Fuhrer.

Governments elected by PR without clear majorities are subject to the horse-trading whims of minor parties and this does not necessarily end well, as we saw in Germany and as we may be seeing again with the rise of the AfD.

Bob Britnell

Kent customers staying away from Eurostar

I wonder if Francois Le Doze of Eurostar has ever considered asking the 22,000 people who have no option but to use St Pancras if, given the choice, they would instead prefer to travel from either Ashford or Ebbsfleet.

I suspect he would find that a sizable number would opt for a Kent station.

No doubt he’s correct in saying that increasingly people are keen to travel to mainland Europe by train.

However, as the company’s chief commercial officer, surely he cannot be satisfied with the overcrowded situation which prevails at its London terminal at peak times.

I am aware of past customers who like - and indeed want - to use the service but have said ‘never again’ as long as it means being subjected to the uncomfortable state that is St Pancras.

Talk of other operators, including Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin, wanting to have access to operate on the high-speed line is indeed welcome news.

If their trains were to stop at Ashford and Ebbsfleet I’m sure the people of Kent, East Sussex and further afield, would be only too delighted to use them.

Bill Burnett

Use brownfield sites for new homes

Once again Mr Wisdom (letters, March 6) lives up to his name. There is no way we can continue destroying farmland.

We have very little farmland left for a huge and growing population and the world situation (both from a political and climate point of view) means that it will be increasingly difficult to import food from abroad.

Apart from food, we will soon run out of water in south east England.

The only way to provide housing is by reusing "brownfield" land.

Rosemary Sealey

Net zero is pointless while others pollute

So John Cooper wants to inflict ULEZ charges on the people of Kent (letters last week).

He totally disregards the costs and the fact that many poor people can never afford to buy a new car that is environmentally friendly, which means these people will have no transport at all.

The UK is sitting on millions of tons of coal, shale oil and gas which people like John Cooper and Ed Miliband and his merry men have stopped using, meaning that Britain has one of the highest electricity and fuel costs in the world, with many poor people suffering from cold because of their policies.

It wouldn’t be so bad if the whole world was engaged in reducing carbon emissions and trying to achieve net zero but they are not. China has built dozens of coal-fired power stations and what little we have gained in our clean air environment is being undone by countries like China, Russia and USA, the biggest polluters.

This is nothing more than a pipe dream. All the statistics are meaningless when you are unable to afford to switch the light on or buy a more modern car.

Sid Anning

Eating less meat helps the environment

The government's independent advisers, the Climate Change Committee (CCC) have just published their recommendations for the period 2038-2042, in order to achieve Net Zero by 2050.

This lists the necessary increase in renewables, heat pumps and electric vehicles, low carbon fuels, carbon capture and storage, insulation, greater use of public transport, cycling and walking, increase in woodland and peat restoration and reductions in meat consumption.

To absorb CO2 from the atmosphere, the CCC propose to increase woodland from 13% of UK land to 19% by 2050. This is a large area the equivalent of Cornwall, Devon and Dorset combined.

In order to do this, land used for cattle and sheep needs to be reduced. This also has the advantage of reducing methane produced.

Our agricultural concentration on meat production is enormously inefficient. A staggering 85% of agricultural land in the UK is used for cattle and sheep. In terms of the same amount of protein, beef requires 163 times as much land as needed for instance for soya, and lamb needs 185 times as much.

The CCC recommends a 35% reduction of meat and dairy by 2050 compared with 2019. The NHS already recommends reducing our consumption of red and processed meats and the benefits of greater consumption of vegetables are widely accepted.

A recent study found that the UK's addiction to unhealthy food was costing £268bn per year, more than the annual cost of the NHS. The CCC's recommendations show we can eat more healthily and at the same time help reduce climate change. Not a bad plan?

Mike Baldwin

Tech is taking over our lives

Our beautiful country has not been conquered since 1066, until now.

We find ourselves being dictated to by faceless tech companies. Go online to bank, get doctors’ appointments, contact services, HMRC, etc.

Don't worry if you can't submit an e-consult for the doctor, we will fill it in for you. In other words, enslave us by proxy.

Our children cannot be taught unless the schools have banks of computers. The banks are having to pay their customers millions in compensation for tech failures.

Tech is to serve us, not we it. Every letter we receive from officials urges us to go online and save the planet. How much do the devices cost to produce and use?

We are in the fictional world of 1984, except this is the real world. The worst of it is that generations to come will never know a world in which they can exist without engaging with technology.

Anne Bacon