Like Trevor Farrer (Letters, July 13, ‘Young need to read history’), I remember the 1970s and, like him, I also know that history didn’t start in 1970.

We both, I am sure, know, for example, that it was the political left that created the NHS and that this was achieved in the teeth of opposition from the political right.

The Tory governments of the 1950s responding to that most persuasive of political whisperers - popularity - not only embraced the NHS but engaged in an open bidding competition with the Labour Party over who would build more council houses.

So, history lovers, that which emerges from the political left is not to be decried as necessarily the work of the forces of evil.

The phrase in Trevor’s letter “…when the union bosses virtually dictated to the Government …” is pretty close to the truth, but if you substitute ‘big business’ for ‘union bosses’, it is equally close to the truth for today.

The conceit of the 1970s union leaders did the country no good at all, but inflation at 20 per cent is small beer compared to the recent near-destruction of the global economic system caused by the monstrous greed, cynicism and incompetence of the banking industry - an only just-averted catastrophe that had been made possible by the naiveté of both New Labour and the Tories.

So the doings of the left and right are not the simple black and white of armchair politics.

Moving on from reality, I note that R Hall (Letters, July 13,’Rescue us from politics’) approves of intervention by the divine foot.

Is this not the same tactic as employed - to a chorus of near-universal disapproval - by door-to-door salespersons, a practice that got going the very moment that both doors and selling things had been invented?

Perhaps this is the moment to re-investigate the interventative possibilities of those stern warnings that once adorned a multitude of front garden gates - “No hawkers. No circulars. No divine feet”.

Geoff Brambles

Kendal