Sir: Having read the detail of the Framework Document in the Independent today, I still think it is the best hope for Northern Ireland, but I can now see why the Ulster Unionist leaders see it as a threat. Almost two-thirds of the text is taken up by...

Sir: We are delighted to see from the text of the framework document for Northern Ireland, as given in the Independent today, that John Major has come out in favour of proportional representation, and devolution to the regions within the context of s...

In recent years, unprecedented technological advances have brought dynamic growth in the world's telecommunications markets. At the same time, strain on public sector budgets has led to new government policies and regulations aimed at privatising and...

Sir: I must take issue with Eric Caines' article on NHS pay ("Rubbing salt in nurses' wounds", 22 February). He starts from a position that it would have been better for ministers to have imposed local pay on the NHS. This would not have been the rig...

Sir: Professor David Ward says in his letter (22 January) about the Probation Service that there is "ample evidence" that the social work approach of probation services has been "effective in reducing reoffending". However, he does not adduce or even...

Sir: Unlike Professor Rutter (Letters, 21 February), I found Professor Bateson's article ("The perils of genetic determinism", 18 February) rather refreshing. It seems these days that every time I open a newspaper, or indeed even a medical journal, I...

Sir: David Nicholson-Lord's article (18 February) reported that complaints by gas customers have nearly doubled over the year and that last month alone, they were up 172 per cent over January 1994. A famous news-reader's view of contemporary news - t...

Sir: Michael Sheridan quotes the director of the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency as saying that, "A number of countries are attracted to the self-defeating idea that the Non-Proliferation Treaty should be held hostage [to various conditions]."...

Sir: With regard to the debate on the bad braking of British Rail trains, safety controllers should take a look at trams on the Continent. Trams are also "light", "short", "have disc brakes", experience a "leaf fall season" and have "lots of stopping...

Sir: It is a pity that Michael Sheridan's otherwise useful account of the manoeuvering over the extension of the Non-Proliferation Treaty was marred by the implication that the treaty will come to an end if the Extension Conference that opens on East...

Sir: Christian Wolmar's article about inadequate brakes on Turbo trains concludes with a quote from a BR driver: "There is no doubt that there is a fundamental design problem." ("Ex-driver says train fault was clear from start", 22 February.) Now, I ...

My proposition is a simple one. We cannot expect the public to have confidence in public institutions when many public servants are known to be members of a secret society, one of the aims of which is mutual self-advancement. It is no part of my case...

Sir: Surely the Sunday Times shoots itself in the foot (sorry!) when it claims that, while operating as a KGB agent, the former leader of the Labour Party went by the codename Boot. Boot is, of course, the hero in Evelyn Waugh's Scoop - a book dedica...

Sir: In his review of the De Kooning show at the Tate Gallery, Andrew Graham-Dixon casts me in the role of "Pope" in a "canonisation" of that artist ("In search of the edible woman", 21 February). But De Kooning was canonised before Mr Graham-Dixon w...

If the thinking contained in the document could be made real in new political institutions and practices, the achievement would rank with decolonisation and entry into the Common Market as milestones in the United Kingdom's constitutional progress si...

Sir: To quote from Michael Winner's defence of violent films: The headmaster... rambled on with similar tedium about how... the gangster films, which I devotedly saw, would turn us all into dreadful human beings. No comment required. Yours faithfully...