PEOPLE who believe uncritically everything they read in the press, deserve the pessimism they end up with.

Mr Ryder (Letters, August 6) as a 1939-45 war veteran, knows perfectly well that social cohesion and togetherness was deliberately attacked as social inefficiency for decades before the Blair Government, because as soon as you create social consideration and wait a bit for the "tail-end Charlies", the big sharks take objection. And most of Fleet Street is owned by Tories and others cynical about improving people and society at large.

We have a perfect example in Ceeaitch's whinge about post offices in the same issue.

Sub-post offices have been attacked by robbers and the cost of preventing those robberies, and latterly by the arrival of cheap electronic banking. Mobile phones and email have cut their letters business. Now does Ceeaitch want "efficiency", or does he want "socialism", that is supporting weaker, needy members of society?

Part of the grousing in the Guide Letters column is pure anachronistic forgetfulness that we are no longer the paramount power and have to negotiate as equals. We have 60 million of the EU's 450 million population (13 per cent) and at 78 out of 732 MEPs (11 per cent) we are about right on representation.

The Jim Homewoods of this world might not like it, but the pre-1920 Irish had over-representation at Westminster and, since the 1960s, Scotland and Wales have had a capitation supplement in central grant to give them "an even chance" and to slow the accumulation of interests in London.

If the United Kingdom pulls out of the EU, Scotland and Wales could well stay in and that would reduce Britain, certainly England, to an irrelevance.

FRANK ADAM