Letters: Burma

Sir: The pain of the Burmese continues. And heads of government around the world are no nearer to offering a solution than they were in 1988. They mouth platitudes, but platitudes don't stop the killings, the poverty, or the riding roughshod over human rights.

The Chinese government is key. We, as individuals, must send them an unambiguous message. We must stop buying their products and having holidays in China; we must explain why we are taking these actions. Athletes, and people planning to attend the Beijing Olympics, must explain that they will stay at home unless China persuades the Burmese junta to stop the killing and the poverty, and allow political self-expression.

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Goods left on shelves, unsold, and tourists staying away, together with a threatened boycott of the Games, will provide China with a strong incentive for effective intervention with the self-styled State Peace and Development Council.

We, unlike governments, who allow their actions to be circumscribed by geo-political rationale, can effect change if enough of us get involved.

P Fenton

London NW3

Sir: It seems likely that the dramatic events of the last week will have shaken Chinese officials just as much as their Burmese counterparts. With their failure, in the face of hefty international pressure, to make serious efforts to encourage democratic reform in Burma, senior Communist Party members are no doubt bracing themselves for a tide of condemnation over their broader human rights record.

China is determined to use the Beijing Olympics to gain international esteem and announce its arrival as a modern economic superpower. Yet concern at China's bolstering of Burma's brutal junta is almost certain to spark similar international revulsion at its ongoing deplorable treatment of Tibetans, Taiwanese and Inner Mongolians, throwing an almighty spanner in the works of the waking industrial monster.

With the eyes of the world on China as it gears up to host the Olympics next August, over the coming year we have an unprecedented opportunity to improve the lot of those minorities who have suffered under China's ruthless industrial and economic expansion, enduring religious repression, displacement from their land, plundering of their environment and torture of dissidents.

Will the world's democracies turn a blind eye to human rights abuses and a broken promise to the International Olympic Committee for widespread improvements? Or will we demand a price for China's entry in to the community of civilised nations, beginning with genuine improvements in Tibet and sincere dialogue with the Dalai Lama?

Dr Simon Bradshaw

Clifton Hill, Victoria, Australia

Tory taxes for an unequal society

Sir: When an estate valued at £500,000 or £900,000, and composed largely of unearned and untaxed house price escalation, is handed on to a generation who did not create it, why should it pay not a penny in tax? Does an earned annual income one tenth as large pay no tax? As usual, the Tory agenda is inequality.

Christopher Clayton

Waverton, Cheshire

Sir: The abhorrent thing about inheritance tax is not, as the Conservatives say, that tax is paid because you die but that the deceased person has their estate taxed when almost all of it would have had tax levied on it at some point before in their life. It is therefore a double tax.

Laurence Williams

Thetford, Norfolk

Sir: Inheritance tax is an almost perfect tax. Given that we have taxes, what could be better than a tax you do not have to pay until you are dead, that is very redistributive and that is efficient to collect.

The usual complaint against inheritance tax is that it is double taxation. This is true of a whole range of taxes, such as VAT and excise duties, but, given that there is no capital gains tax on your main home, I would suggest there has been very little tax paid on the estates of many people now paying inheritance tax.

If the Conservatives can identify £3.6bn of tax savings, then let's use it to reduce a really unpopular tax and bring down the basic rate of income tax by 1p. Or maybe that would not meet the Conservative's current election bribes.

Steve Horsfield

Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire

Sir: By the time the Tories are back in power, the average house price will be £1m anyway.

Steve Webb

Cardiff

Sir: While reading the extensive coverage of shadow Chancellor George Osborne's plans for a £25,000 annual levy on those claiming non-domiciled status, it occurred to me that we are missing an opportunity here.

These people are choosing to live abroad in order to avoid paying tax on their vast wealth. The solution is obvious: redefine non-domiciled to mean not those parts of the globe outside our borders, but those parts of our own land that are the most deprived.

Under such a scheme a rich newspaper baron, for example, could choose to reside for the necessary portion of each year in a tower block in a less desirable part of London and get all the tax benefits of a non-domiciled status. Such an enterprising person would, presumably, use some small part of their vast wealth to transform their immediate surroundings into something more to their liking, and in the process benefit the rest of those who live there. There would, of course, be losses in tax revenue, but, on the other hand, the Government would not have to spend so much on grandiose schemes to revitalise such areas.

Following George Osborne's example, I leave others to work out the fine detail.

Matt Nicholson

Bristol

Defra resists plan to save beech trees

Sir: The "Helping Nature Adapt" event, discussed as a hot topic at all three party conferences, belies the real inertia on the ground. The plight of the beech tree in the UK is an example.

The beech is under threat from climate change in the south, where it is classified as native, and is under threat from felling in the north, where it is classified as non-native. As far back as 2002, English Nature (now Natural England) reported that "beech woodland in the north and west should be maintained as potential future natural stands under the future changed climate . . . reversal of past recommendations will be needed" ("The implications of climate change for the conservation of beech woodlands and associated flora in the UK" – Research Report 528, Sonia Wesche 2002).

The "non-native" classification means that grants are given to fell mature and maturing beech woodland, which is happening in several places in Cumbria now. South Lakeland Friends of the Earth are campaigning for reclassification of beech in Cumbria to "new native", a simple solution to help nature adapt, but even this is meeting with resistance from Defra.

Marianne Bennett

South Lakeland Friends of the Earth, Milnthorpe, Cumbria

Sir: At the same time that we are considering the Severn tidal barrage system (letter, 28 September), we are also reading of the environmental effects of the Three Gorges dam. Surely we should learn from grandiose building projects and use the money that we would spend on the barrage in a different way.

For instance, how about ensuring that every house in the UK can generate its own power, heat and hot water using renewable energy? The Independent has had several advertisements for geothermal energy in the past few weeks. It can be done and it should be done, but the entrenched interests of the energy companies will probably kill off the idea of microgeneration.

Jonathan Dumbell

London E15

Dawkins chooses soft targets

Sir: Professor Bowen (letter, 19 September) invited Richard Dawkins to deal with reasonable, non-fundamentalist Christianity, and yet (letter, 1 October) in citing Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, as a possible place of engagement, Professor Dawkins stubbornly persists in dealing, like his fellow atheists Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, with fundamentalist extremes.

Given the nonsense that has emanated from Wycliffe in the last year or so, many of us who do not stand for such ludicrously exclusivist sorts of Christianity would not be at all surprised – or much concerned – if its university licence was removed. It is becoming, by all accounts, something of an embarrassment to the University and to the Church.

But there are – if Professor Dawkins has the intellectual stomach for them – plenty of forms of Christianity to deal with which are not of the "barking" variety: ones which seek to make full use of the critical tools available to any discipline.

He seems frightened of dealing with such credible Christianity and the reason here seems pretty obvious: his unsophisticated, chattering-classes atheism isn't up to being in dialogue with it intellectually.

Canon Chris Chivers

Blackburn Cathedral

Sir: When Richard Dawkins writes about science, I am reminded that he is Professor of the Public Understanding of Science. When he writes about theology, I find it hard not to think of him as High Priest of the Evangelical Church of Evolution Omnipotent.

Nick Maclaren

Cambridge

Asylum rules betray Sudan activists

Sir: The Sudanese who are being refused asylum here are often civil society activists who have fallen foul of a despotic regime, and who only fled their country as a last resort ("The callous hypocrisy of our asylum system", 2 October). They need a chance to recover and reorganise, but are often the people most likely to contribute to future stability and human rights in Sudan. By keeping them in limbo or under threat of deportation, the UK is wasting a potentially valuable resource.

Disturbingly, the Home Office ignores the role of Sudan's security apparatus in orchestrating the Darfur conflict and targeting opponents of the regime across the country. This is like ignoring the Gestapo when discussing the Second World War.

Why does it dismiss the UNHCR's clear warning about the risk of return for Darfur refugees? And why does it invite Sudan's embassy officials to interview refused asylum seekers before their options for appeal have been explored? Now Sudanese security police boast of knowing the details of scores of opponents in the UK – and it seems we've put the fox in charge of the hen coop.

Peter Verney

Sudan Update, Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire

Politics? Sorry, I live in the wrong place

Sir: I have been watching recent political events and the party conferences with some interest. I am impressed with Gordon Brown, and with the Government's calm handling of the terrorist and the foot-and-mouth issues. I approve of their commitment to provide affordable housing and to tackle world poverty and climate change. I would include these factors in my decision of who to vote for in the next election if I did not live in Croydon South. The constituency always returns a Tory candidate, so my vote doesn't matter.

I like the Tories' plans for inheritance tax and for the easing of stamp duty for first-time buyers. I am concerned, though, that the party leaders are hiding their right-wing tendencies beneath social democratic clothing which they will quickly discard if they get into power. But perhaps I should vote Tory and give them the chance. Not that my deliberations matter, because I live in Croydon South, so it makes no difference who I vote for.

Can any of the leaders of the major political parties please tell me – in the pages of this newspaper, by all means – why I should bother myself with their speeches and policies, or with politics at all at a national level, when I have been disenfranchised by our current voting system? Can they tell me why I should feel involved, why I should care, when I have zero influence?

Phil Janes

Coulsdon, Surrey

Briefly...

Nuclear weapons for all

Sir: Mohamed Khodr (letter, 28 September) is wrong when he asserts that "it's OK for Jews and Christians to have nukes, but not Muslims". Pakistan has a nuclear bomb.

Joe Hayward

Stanmore, Middlesex

Low-energy risks

Sir: To add to your correspondence on the phasing in of low energy light bulbs, I wonder if the policy has been thought through at all. According to an article in the latest Scientific American, each low-energy bulb contains around 5 milligrams of mercury, a highly poisonous heavy metal. To my knowledge, there has been no information on methods of recycling defunct bulbs or even on how to deal with accidentally broken bulbs in the home. Throwing large numbers into landfill seems to me an extremely bad idea.

D G C Jones

Llanwrtyd Wells, Powys

Rubbish rage

Sir: How utterly petty does Patricia Hague (letter, 1 October) sound when she states that because she is unable to do her recycling exactly as she wants to, there is "no point in recycling anything" at all? Who exactly does she think will benefit from such a childish response? Our council doesn't recycle glass, but instead of folding my arms, sticking out my bottom lip and having a hissy fit, I take the glass to the recycling bin in town, and leave the other items to be collected every other week. It's called personal responsibility.

Jacquie Duffield

Great Yarmouth, Norfolk

Inconvenience fee

Sir: Tom Bloomfield (letter, 2 October) is perplexed by booking fees for theatre tickets. Yesterday, I paid such a fee to Catford Broadway Theatre that was euphemistically called a "convenience fee" when I booked on the internet. I am confused, too: surely it costs less to process this than to employ someone who sits in a box-office all day.

David Hasell

Thames Ditton, Surrey

Irrational but British

Sir: Roddy Urquhart (letter, 1 October) misses the point about metrication: there's nothing wrong with it; it is a far better system than imperial. It's just that it runs contrary to the eccentricity of us British. Not for us the soulless, rational uniformity of the continentals: only in Britain do we buy our fuel in litres and then futilely attempt to measure our vehicle's fuel consumption in miles per gallon.

John Shepherd

Cockermouth, Cumbria