Letter: The remedy is a lottery strike

Sir: Today you contrast ("Winners don't buy tickets", 27 April) the experience of a car worker ("a mug", £500 worse off) and Winston Churchill MP ("no mug", £12m better off) with the National Lottery. You say:

This startling redistribution of wealth from ordinary working people to leading Conservatives is not what most folk expected to happen to money from the lottery.

This is naive. Redistribution from the mug to the powerful is precisely the object of gambling. The shame is that this has become Government policy. The Wall Street Journal has described the Lottery as

exploitation of the masses by the state itself ... an official willingness to engage in dubious activity to cadge more revenues.

What the Poll Tax failed to do has now been achieved. One must, I suppose, at least congratulate the administration on its victory; though it may yet prove Pyrrhic.

Yours faithfully,

ROGER REED

The Rectory

Blendworth, Hampshire

27 April