Letters to the Editor – week ending 22 February 2026

Read what people have been writing to our editor about this week. Find out how to share your own views here.

The article on facilitating the growth of discount supermarkets simplifies a complex issue.

My Leeds suburb has a large Sainsbury’s and a smaller Tesco and Co-op. Lidl proposes to build a super store next to Sainsbury’s. Many people are opposed to this because it would hugely increase traffic in an already congested area and because it would remove a set of premises providing very well used services. In particular there is a very popular and low cost adult gym and a well used children’s gym. There’re are no suitable vacant sites in the areas for these businesses to relocate, meaning a significant loss of community facilities. The only gym close by, the very expensive David Lloyd gym, is only accessible by car. 

Surely current planning legislation allows for the weighing up of what will often be competing priorities. 

Ros Garrick

*****

The U-turn on elections should not be the last one, two more are needed.

First, reversing the increase in employers National Insurance as this is hitting youth employment so hard.  An alternative source of tax money can easily be found.  And the second is the proposed appeal against the Palestine Action proscription being deemed unlawful. 

Protest should never be banned in this way and if there is violent action, which has never previously been in a public area, that should be dealt with by the existing criminal law.

Phil Tate

Chester

*****

Marco Rubio’s speech to the Munich Security Conference was a call for a reassertion of unashamedly racist “Western” imperial dominance, for Europe to slash its welfare states and green transition, to prepare to compete for “new frontiers” of exploitation in the global south through assertions of raw military power. The audience gave him a standing ovation. This is a route to catastrophe; austerity and crumbling infrastructure at home, along with tearing our communities apart ICE style, and military adventurism abroad – replacing aid with raids. It should be utterly rejected, not greeted with “sighs of relief”. 

Laura Kyrke-Smith and Melanie Ward’s argument that Europe “must stand strong” on its own does not confront the projection by George Robertson that doing so militarily within the current framework of escalating  the confrontation with Russia, would cost not 5% of GDP but 7%. That’s an additional £135 billion every year. That would be ruinous in the immediate term and, in so far as it sucks resources away from the energy transition, will kill us in the longer term, even if the temptation to use all this hardware is resisted and it didn’t lead to nuclear war within the decade.

What we need instead is meaningful peace negotiations with Russia over Ukraine to resolve this European civil war, reintegrate our economies within a mutual security arrangement that would also help us form a more developmental relationship with China and the rest of the global South.

Paul Atkin

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