Many letters have deplored Dorset Council’s intention to build a huge housing estate North of Dorchester. A protest group has been formed. I’m not the only one to have submitted objections to this hideous plan both via the current consultation and also that initiated by West Dorset District Council two years ago.

There’s no doubt in my mind that our efforts will be in vain.

The Tory party has always put individual wealth before our society’s prerogatives of education, health, food and housing. Only once has this self-destructive policy been avoided and that was during the 1940s. The endless ‘war’ between the forces of capitalism and socialism are now continually fought across the ‘no-man’s land’ of Westminster and the faceless media. Uniquely, the UK is stuck in FPTP trench warfare - you can smell the futility of it all everywhere. It divides us when we need to work together.

People’s votes do not count.

The BBC revealed this week how Covid 19 has starkly exposed our failings on every front. It’s no surprise to me that they are ones the more philanthropic of your readers have been aware of for decades. Poor health, lack of affordable housing, low wages, an NHS squeezed to death by this government for 12 years, crowded tenements, austerity and zero hours contracts have all conspired to ruin the lives of the ‘have-nots’. But, this is clearly ‘out of the earshot’ of the ‘haves’ who get richer by the day.

It’s arguable that their wealth is measurable now in lives destroyed or lost. The greedy are the first to make a profit out of disaster. Even the £22 billion per annum we provide by way of Housing Benefit goes straight into landlords’ pockets. Is it any wonder that they, estate agents, developers, builders and secondhome seekers are ‘slavering at the mouth’ at the juicy prospects of yet another 4,000 houses?

Many of us dragged ourselves out of the depths of poverty 75 years ago only with the help of council housing but later chose to forget our pasts by joining the self-satisfied middle-classes.

No-one should feel entitled to better prospects than anyone else. We should all get the same opportunities in life despite the ‘luck’ good or bad, of our birth.

On that point, can Richard Drax should stop telling everyone that things will get better eventually.

They are getting worse!

MIKE JOSLIN

DORCHESTER