I HOPE I may comment, as a lifelong spinster and Conservative, on the article by Geoff Lawler objecting to the Conservative proposal to reinstate the marriage allowance in some form (Yorkshire Post, August 26).

If he needs to buttress his argument by such feeble proposals as suggesting single people should be protected from discrimination in the forthcoming Equalities Bill, the argument is too weak to be worth making.

As a Conservative, I support any move to leave more people with more of their own money. It is appallingly wasteful to employ armies of civil servants to remove large proportions of money, only to return chunks of it in another guise.

I believe government – local and national – should limit itself to taking money only for things either that cannot be done by individuals or where there is a consensus for large-scale state activity.

I also distrust government attempts at social engineering. Mr Lawler appears to think that the reintroduction of the marriage allowance is intended to bribe more people into ill-considered unions. The intention, on the contrary, is
to make the decision on marriage nearer to fiscal neutrality by removing the bias towards remaining single and apart. The bias is particularly strong for people of limited means.

Mr Lawler's objection that marriage allowances risk "sending a signal to single parents or those who choose to live in what might be deemed unconventional structures that the Conservatives think that you, and the country as a whole, would be better off if you were married" seems strange.

The vast majority of single parents are not single intentionally. Singleness is a result of death, desertion or intolerable behaviour, not choice. State support for marriage is irrelevant in this case. What is an "unconventional structure"? People alone by choice or chance are not part of a structure.

Does it mean, for example, polygamy, which seems to me to be demeaning to women, or incest, which is biologically undesirable?

Mr Lawler does not like what he perceives as discrimination against single people. Apart from poll taxes, all taxes discriminate.

My argument is a marriage allowance evens the fiscal balance, and any remaining imbalance is worthwhile for its social advantages.


Return ticket to the sound of railway past

From: Stuart Clark, Aberford Road, Garforth, Leeds.

THE article by Mark Branagan about the BBC's Railway Roundabout programme (Yorkshire Post, September 1) brings to mind the late Peter Handford, a former member of the Army Film and Photographic Unit, who was deployed to make live sound recordings of the railway marshalling activities in the preparations for
D-Day.

Although following a career in the film industry, he became aware of the rapidly disappearing sounds of the railways and began to record and compile a collection which was to become a definitive record of not only steam but also diesel, which later became a commercial enterprise.

Realising the need for archival retrieval, he bequeathed the collection to the National Railway Museum at York.

Peter's other success was in being awarded an Oscar as sound recordist for the film Out Of Africa, noted for the evocative opening establishing shot of a steam train chugging across open arid country.


We don't have a truly United Kingdom any more

From: Lynda Greene, Trent Close, Burscough, Lancashire.

I DO not accept that the Union needs to be preserved "at all costs", as argued by Mark Stuart (Yorkshire Post, August 1). At the moment, the only people paying the costs are the English. In fact, the only people obliged to be British are the English.

We do not have a United Kingdom any more. We have Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and a country that this government has been striving to reduce to regions.

It is time for England to get the equality and recognition it deserves. We need an English Parliament and an end to the grossly unfair Barnett formula.

If this cannot be achieved without a break up of the Union, then so be it.

From: Roger Prescott, Fore Street, Plympton, Plymouth.

TO preserve the undemocratic and constitutionally flawed Union, Mark Stuart spouts more Unionist drivel masquerading as cogent argument. He wants the Scots to be in charge of their own money and less able to blame London for an alleged lack of funding.

However, they are already in charge of their over-generous slice of the Union money pie through the anachronistic Barnett Formula. The Scots can also raise taxes to pay for better, or additional services, but,
of course, they have never done this.

The Conservative Party may be forced by events to change its mind about the Union, and David Cameron had better watch his step.

Do the English want another half-Scot in charge who, from his previous utterances, particularly when he is in Scotland, is so obviously
anti-English?

What England needs is to establish an English Parliament for the furtherance of the English people. An uphill task considering the Celtic mafia at Westminster and in the media, but it must and
will happen.

From: D Grant, Woodfield Road, Burbage, Leicester.

IF the Union of the UK is to continue, we must have fairness for all within it. Mark Stuart's views are out of date and his solutions needlessly complex.

Let Scotland and Wales have completely independent powers and let England have the same. This means our own English Parliament (no extra MPs, just those who now sit for English seats) and a Federal Assembly if and
when needed.

Taxation from those who will spend it, not from England to the others.

Sounds fair to me. How about your readers?