Will this be our last general election under First Past the Post? I hope so

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Neither the pundits nor the pollsters have any idea what the result of the general election will be.

But it’s not unlikely that the lion’s share of seats will go, as ever, to fence-straddling Labour and to the Egregious Reactionary Grandees, aka the Tories.

Many people are faced with the prospect of second-guessing other voters, as is usual in elections. But this time they even have no idea whether the latter are choosing a government for the next five years or simply expressing a preference for leaving or remaining in the EU.

It’s too late for this election but if we have pretensions to democracy, surely the time has come for us to consign our archaic first-past-the-post voting system to the bin.

Susan Alexander
South Gloucestershire

Johnson is his own worst enemy

Johnson’s biggest liability is his reputation for a tenuous connection between many of his statements and the truth. His position would be much stronger if people thought he could be believed.

Adrian Cosker
Hitchin, Herts​

Refugees remind us of our duty to other humans

We have a responsibility towards refugees and migrants. A lost generation of children and adults who have seen nothing but horrific images of war and devastation, need to be taken seriously. Millions of refugees have fled their war-ravaged countries in pursuit of safety and security, with hosting communities, civil society groups, faith-based organisations and UN global humanitarian agencies struggling to provide essential services, health and social solidarity and support to refugees. We need to comprehend further the challenges and opportunities that arise in such responses to mass displacement, or whether refugees’ experiences of agony and displacement have been taken into account or have informed decision makers to tailor policies catering for the financial, political, social, educational, gender and religious needs of refugees. Only then will we rise to the challenge and be human.

Dr Munjed Farid Al Qutob​
London

Sturgeon needs to stop scaremongering on the NHS

Nicola Sturgeon was campaigning in Rutherglen yesterday, where she told a small crowd that “this is a real crossroads moment for Scotland” and that Scotland’s NHS must be in Scotland’s hands. Here we have a first minister and former health secretary who does not know that the NHS in Scotland is fully devolved and therefore fully in the hands of the Scottish government.

Jill Stephenson
Edinburgh

Politicians are ‘green washing’ voters

The science around climate change is complex, as are many of the various solutions to reducing our carbon emissions that we know about today, and we have numbers of brilliant academics, institutions and organisations who have been working on these issues for decades. I fear that the MPs’ decision to appoint a Citizens’ Assembly to resolve the UK’s climate change issues diminishes the value of this work, will have a disappointing outcome and will delay effective action.

Invitations to join the Citizens’ Assembly are being sent to randomly selected households but it is clear that most people (including MPs) have little knowledge of how to mitigate climate change, and little interest in changing their behaviours to reduce carbon emissions. Many believe, for example, that electric vehicles are zero-carbon. They will not be zero-carbon to run until our electricity supply is entirely carbon neutral and EVs may well be produced using significant amounts of carbon. EVs do provide cleaner air, however, which is clearly required in cities.

Similarly, the Labour campaign vastly oversimplifies what needs to be done, seeming to imply that they will solve the problem by fitting loft insulation, double glazing, solar panels and heat pumps to millions of homes. These technologies could indeed be part of the solution but one size does not fit all, and in case some readers think electricity driven by the solar panels will be used to run the heat pumps, it is worth considering that solar panels generate about 75 per cent of the electricity in summer, when generally our space heating should be off!

Voters need to beware of campaign green-wash and the next government needs to give the issue of mitigating climate change a high priority, involving the experts we have.

Dr Clare Carden​
Aberdeen

Stop cutting corners on climate change

I occasionally come across people who tell me that the UK contribution to global emissions is so small that whatever we do doesn’t really make a difference. Putting aside the obvious points about showing how to behave ethically there is a clear case for shifting the focus from governments and countries to individual people.

Given that the majority of excess CO2 was generated by the west, it is only reasonable to look at our ongoing contribution per head and compare it with all other inhabitants of planet Earth.

Uncomfortable though this truth will be it will serve to show the enormity of the task facing us all and our relative responsibility for dealing with it.

Armed with this information and hopefully realising that we can’t go on living like this, we should then be putting pressure on our governments to help us to reduce our own individual contributions.

Ashley Herbert
Huddersfield