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

Some letters refer to past correspondence which can be found by clicking here.

Rwanda scheme will help genuine cases

All I can say about Ray Duff’s comments on asylum seekers is that he must be very gullible to accept at face value, the reasons for their transit across the channel.

Ray Duff says that he would give an asylum seeker sanctuary if he had the room in his own home. But hang on Ray, there’s a certain irony here, you keep telling us that these are people who are supposedly escaping wars and conflict, etc, which is why we should accept all those crossing the channel, but you say you haven’t got the room?

Even if I was an asylum seeker, regardless of what is happening in my own country, I would not risk my wife and children in a rubber boat crossing the world’s busiest channel. But what this is really all about is that these people want a better life, with many disappearing into the black economy.

At least we agree on one thing, there is not enough housing. We have shown enormous charity in Britain but the sooner the Rwanda flights start running, the better it will be for all concerned as then we will only accept those that can truthfully qualify to be here.

Sid Anning

Fitting punishment for crossing protesters

As a regular user of the Dartford Crossing, I was pleased to hear and see that the two protesters got their just rewards and were made an example of.

However has this highlighted a Health and Safety issue that I and all other road user's be concerned when using this crossing?

I can now only assume that the Dartford Crossing is being monitored 24/7 in the event of broken down vehicle or an accident. If this is the case, how did the protesters manage to either walk up the bridge or be dropped off by a third party with all their camping and climbing gear undetected?

Is cutting back on costs and putting lives at risk?

Tony Wright

Child murderers deserve to be executed

Yet another innocent child, Lola James, has been tormented, and finally died at the hands of the brutes who should have been caring for her.

I found reading the statement from her real father when he said "Lola was as bright as the golden sun. She was beautiful, charming and cheeky. Her laugh would fill the room with pure joy. Even as a toddler Lola has a passion for the outdoors and everything out there - the birds, bees and butterflies” almost unbearable. This child will never know the joys of life, yet the cowardly monsters who killed her will one day walk free again.

I am sure that I am not alone in feeling overwhelming pity for the poor mite, hatred for those who killed her, and anger that once again an innocent was failed by the system which should have protected her. I am also sure that many ordinary people will agree with me that murderers like this should be executed, not merely as a deterrent, important as that is, but also as a simple matter of justice.

How much longer are the delicate consciences of those who consider themselves so liberal in opposing capital punishment going to be allowed to prevent just punishment being imposed on those who crimes cry out to heaven?

Colin Bullen

Doing the sums on cost of living

The Prime Minister has raised the importance of mathematics and the lack of understanding of the subject.

May I offer explanations of some mathematical terms

Rates of increase: Speed is a measure of the rate at which we move across space. Acceleration is the rate at which speed changes.

As we enter a motorway, say at 20mph, we accelerate to 75 mph. We then stop accelerating our speed remains at the higher level of 75mph

The same is true of the cost of living. Inflation measures the rate at which the cost of living increases. The government promises that the rate of inflation will fall, but the cost of living will remain high and continue to increase but at a slower rate.

We use percentages to reduce a population to manageable numbers. Thus the total population is 100%.

We divide this up into 100 groups, each group being a percentile. We can then say that the proportion of the wealth of the nation owned by the richest 10% of the population is half of the total wealth of the country.

In other words that 10% own the same amount of wealth as the remaining 90% of the population.

Ratio: The level of income received by different sections of the population varies. Job seekers’ allowance is £4,409; the basis pension is £8,122; minimum wage is £21,632; the average wage is £31,461 and the top 1% of earners receive £182,532.

To ease comparison of these figures we use ratios to show the relations between these figures.

Thus we find that the ratio between top earners (top 10%) and the average wage earner is 6:1. That is the top earners receive six times that which the average worker earns.

All of these figures disguise many other inequalities due to race, gender, age and disabilities.

Ralph A. Tebbutt

Maths skills don’t add up to much

Rishi Sunak's scheme to ensure all schoolchildren should receive maths tuition up until the age of 18 years is an ambition that would be hard pushed to realise, since there aren't enough maths teachers to implement it.

If his vision is to release a multitude of numerate students, primed to flood the workplace, then he is disillusioned.

He also claims that people who aren't good at the subject should be embarrassed. Well, I've never felt any shame for being inadequate in that particular field since I found it to be indigestible.

The only useful thing I learned in my maths lessons was how to cope with boredom.

No one in my class understood the figures hastily chalked up on the board by the teacher, who never received a show of hands when he asked a question.

I doubt very much if a single student in my year had gained a career which required a knowledge of algebra!

A basic grasp of arithmetic is really all you need to have in order to function in the job market, and even that task has been supplanted by the use of calculators and the internet.

Now, everyone has an equal opportunity to get their sums right, without holding a qualification or being embarrassed.

Michael Smith

View the past as a foreign country

I am neither an apologist for the British Empire nor a supporter of the vile trade of slavery, but I write to add a little balance to last week’s letter ‘Slavery casts a long shadow’.

Predating the Abolition of Slavery Act of 1833, was the Slave Trade Act of 1807 prohibiting the slave trade in the British Empire and encouraging other slave trading nations to do the same.

For some 50 years after that, the British government set up the West Africa Squadron of the Royal Navy with the intention of stopping and seizing any slave trading ship of whatever nation, bringing the slavers to trial and releasing the slaves on board. As these people could not be returned to their own countries and villages, generally due to their being burned down by those African tribes who enslaved them in the first place, many of them settled in Freetown, Sierra Leone.

The cost of the operation was not insubstantial, about 1,600 sailors losing their lives, many from disease, but capturing over 1,500 slavers and freeing over 150,000 slaves. A small amount you might say in the bigger picture but more than most other European countries were doing at the time.

Finally I would like to say isn’t it about time we realised that “the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there”. It’s today and tomorrow we need to focus on. The slavery that still continues now, from Asia, through the Indian sub continent, into the Middle East and Europe and still in the Americas. That must be where we should be concentrating our efforts at abolition and, dare I say, apology?

Without that “long shadow” that slavery no doubt casts we, in the UK wouldn’t have such a vibrant, varied multi-cultural, progressive, inclusive country that we now have. From the worst has come some of the best.

R. Webb