There are many overpaid people in the UK – but they aren’t public sector workers

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Philip Hammond reportedly said that public sector workers are overpaid in a Cabinet meeting

I have been a cancer patient for five and a half years, needing injections from nurses every 28 days to keep me alive.

My local practice had to be put onto special measures partly because nurses keep leaving. My life now depends on a nurse finding the time to come in from another practice.

I also hear that nurses in one hospital are in dire straits because a judge has ordered them to pay the parking fines incurred because the hospital cannot provide enough spaces for them.

Chancellor Philip Hammond is totally out of touch with harsh realities for public sector workers by being in his own overpaid bubble.

Robert F Beck
Address supplied

If Philip Hammond thinks public sector workers are overpaid compared with private sector workers – a typical Tory attempt at promoting divide-and-rule and the politics of envy – how would he describe those private sector CEOs whose salaries are more than 100 times larger than those of their front-line staff?

Pete Dorey
Somerset

Doctor Who?

Doctor Who must NEVER, EVER, EVER give up or give in or be cruel or cowardly.

Welcome Jodie Whittaker - the 13th Doctor.

Sasha Simic
London N1

The ineffable

In the Saturday edition of The Independent, Janet Street-Porter explored the worrying trend of increasing intolerance that is becoming self-evident throughout our society. Fuelled by a myriad of social media options and unshackled by the seeming anonymity that they provide, more and more of us it seems are keen to broadcast hateful and hurtful comments to a potentially wider audience.

She also drew attention to the seemingly exponential rise in the casual and now ubiquitous use of the F-word by all ages and all social groups.

Potentially of greater concern, therefore, is if this then corresponds to an inversely proportionate number of us who are pondering of the “ineffable” in our lives.

Nigel Plevin
Somerset

Turkey cannot join the EU

One of the arguments used by prominent Leave campaigners during the referendum, including Boris Johnson, was that Turkey was going to join the EU imminently.

Having the death penalty is a guaranteed barrier for any country to gain membership of the European Union.

Given the stated intention of President Erdogan to bring executions back following the coup last year, I wonder if those Brexiteers who used Turkey as a scare tactic will now admit their comments were wrong.

Chris Key
​Twickenham

Democracy must prevail

Letter-writer Patrick Cosgrove seems upset that “Theresa May and her Cabinet continue to pursue Brexit” because he believes that they are “victims of their own overinflated egos”.

It might also be because they are doing what the electorate told them to do last year. Like Mr Cosgrove, I suspect that the electorate were wrong; however, unlike him, I’m a democrat that believes that the will of the majority must prevail – that’s the way it works in elections.

Mark Thomas
​Cambridge