JUST a few points about recent letters. I thought GA Woodward’s rant about squaddies teaching his son amazing. He obviously didn’t give it much thought when he claimed they had little or no experience or training - where do young teachers, straight out of training, get their experience, in the student bars? Not all squaddies run around with a sub-machine gun in their hands although all of them are capable of using one. Where do the technicians who keep the ships sailing, the aircraft in the air, the computers working and the communications working get their experience and who teaches them to do all this?

My maths teacher was an ex-submariner, my tech drawing teacher was also ex Royal Navy and the best teacher I ever had to teach me had just left the RAF, and did any teachers go through National Service? He also states that changing the current successful system will not do any good, when according to the OECD rankings for the top 30 countries, the UK has gone from fourth in 2000 to 16th in 2009 for science and from seventh to 25th for reading and from eighth to 28th for maths, so clearly we need to improve.

On the same day RJ Payne brought up that old chestnut about George Osborne’s actual name being Gideon, if my name was Gideon I think I would change it. He then changes it to Slasher which is a little better but not very kind. Perhaps RJ would like a few more name changes to add to his letters - eg Lord Stansgate changed his name to Anthony Wedgwood Benn and then to good old Tony Benn, Anthony Lynton Blair changed his to Tony Blair ‘ a pretty straight kind of guy’, John Straw changed his to Jack Straw after one of the leaders of the peasants’ revolt and John Brown changed his to Gordon Brown, whether it had anything to do with the shipyard or bodies in the grave I’m afraid I don’t know.

Then a letter from Mike Spry, I haven’t seen a letter from Mike for some time so I assume an election is not far away. Mike suggests we go back into history to blame Thatcher and Reagan for deregulating the banks and causing the current financial crisis, he might as well blame William the Conqueror for splitting the country up amongst his lords as to blame Mrs Thatcher - she has been out of power so long somebody should have noticed things were going wrong. In fact, according to Mike, Vince Cable did and warned about it, but I guess G Brown didn’t hear him. In fact G Brown was so pleased with the legacy Mrs Thatcher and the Tories had left us that he loosened the controls a bit more and carried on raking in the tax that was being generated. But G Brown forgot that all good things come to an end and carried on borrowing, to give money away to buy votes. And then the good times came to an end and G Brown said we were best placed to come out of the crisis and we came out last, by a long way.

Mike then goes on to claim it was the solution offered up by G Brown and A Darling that the world accepted and was saved from going into depression, in fact most of the world didn’t have the same problem as the west, but G Brown said he had saved the world so it must be true. Or did he just save the banks in Scotland which had got us into the crisis in the first place? After all this was the Chancellor who sold off our gold reserves cheaply, who removed the 20 per cent tax relief on pensions and subsequently ruined the best pensions in Europe and didn’t provide the money to buy new helicopters for Afghanistan until too many lives had been lost.

The latest is that thanks to A Darling signing up to a deal after he had been booted out of office, we are going to give Portugal £6 billion to shore up their economy, and I thought it was all about cuts.

J E DAVIS Wroughton