MP needs degree of common sense

I am 72 years of age, old enough to remember conditions during the last war.

It seems to me that the country, though not actually at war with anyone else, except for the killing in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is at war with itself. My opinion is that a coalition of MPs is needed instead of one side immediately saying the opposite of what the other has proposed.

There are very few statesmen nowadays – possibly Sir Patrick Cormack is one, but there is no Winston Churchill, Clement Attlee or Tony Benn, only a load of young high flyers, who probably have university degrees in this, that, or the other, while only the University of Life teaches common sense.

This applies to most businesses as well. How is it that now a credit crunch is in full flow, shops are selling products at, in some cases, 60 per cent below their original price? It just shows they were too highly priced in the first place, because they are still making a profit!

A section of the Church of England doesn't seem to know there are laws in this once great country which forbid discrimination against women and homosexuals. I am a member of the Methodist Church and we have had women ministers for many years. The Methodist Conference was quick to issue guidelines to our ministers and other ordained and non-ordained staff (local preachers). Some people couldn't accept it, but the law is the law – at least, that is what my late sister and I were brought up to know all those years ago.

The best achievement of the old Labour government was 60 years ago – the NHS. The worst the Conservatives did, and I have personal experience of this, was to put the care of the mentally ill "into the community" and close a great many mental hospitals.

Eileen M James, The Fold, Oaken.