Want to know what Brexit might look like? Look to Sports Direct

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Wednesday 08 June 2016 17:45 BST
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The Sports Direct boss appearing before ministers yesterday
The Sports Direct boss appearing before ministers yesterday

If you want to see Britain after Brexit and under the influence of a rampant Tory government, look at Mike Ashley's attitude towards his workers.

Doug Flack

Derby

Tony Blair

Blair to argue Iraq would have been worse if Saddam stayed. The man is deluded. It's time to ignore his pathetic comments.

Tony McMahon

Address unknown

Brexit

No doubt there would be a broad consensus of agreement with some of the values underlying Andrew Copson's comments on education and extremism. We value all people irrespective of race, creed, colour. Nevertheless, is 'society' really to be the arbiter of the values conveyed by education? Have children not been entrusted to their parents? Therefore the parents bear responsibility for deciding on the education of their children. They may choose a secular humanist education or they may choose a religious education. The parents must decide what is harmful, and also what is good.

Rev Peter Michell

Address unknown

Hillary Clinton

In using her media megaphone to suppress the vote for Bernie Sanders in California, which she duly carried by far more than had been predicted, Hillary Clinton has committed on an American scale something very like the electoral fraud of which David Cameron's Conservative Party stands daily more accused.

But the nomination process will not in fact end until what promises to be a very contested Convention indeed. There is still time for the Democratic Party to ensure that it will not take four years of Donald Trump to prevent the coronation of the Princess of Privilege as the Empress of Entitlement. Trump's schemes for a Mexican wall and for a Muslim ban do at least have the advantage that they could never happen in actual fact. But Clinton's paybacks to her backers from Wall Street to the Gulf would be very real indeed.

The mercifully single term of President Trump would turn the Democratic Party into a force for economic equality, not least through international peace, and into a force for international peace, not least through economic equality. But the party need not wait for that. It can become that force next month. It can, and it should.

David Lindsay

Lanchester

University admissions

The recently published results of a survey of university admissions tutors featured in your article yesterday (“Students are not being prepared enough for higher education, say university admissions officers”) and the survey reporting the high proportion of university applicants regretting the subject choices they made, sadly, are not a surprise or anything new. Such comments have been made and reported for several years.

As long as the country has an education system that requires pupils to choose and essentially specialise at age sixteen on a narrow range of subjects, coupled with an examination system focussing on regurgitating subject content in a very specific fashion this problem will continue. In a career in teaching lasting well over thirty years duration, the last eight as a Headmaster, I have rarely meet a sixteen year old who knows exactly what they want to do. However, I have met many who think they do.

A programme of Sixth Form education requiring a spread of subjects, including the developing of independent thinking and researching skills, and an examination system that rewards original ideas although still requiring them to be rigorously defended and clearly expressed, such as the International Baccalaureate or similar will give young people the skills, knowledge and time they need to better prepare them to make much more informed and thus better choices.

Paul Mitchell

Cobham

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