I HAVE been saddened by the amount of mud slinging that has been going on in this election saying this or that person has been lying or that party's manifesto doesn't add up in financial terms and would be impossible to fulfil should this or that party come to power.

None of the parties focussed on what I think is paramount to our future, the decline in our manufacturing base, the growth of bureaucracy, the loss of free speech, jobs exported abroad wholesale and a huge, bloated civil service with quangoes and unelected regional assemblies which no one wants and the evil of this country being dragged deeper and deeper into the maw of the EU with the thousands of dictats that constantly pour from it.

H GIBBS

Aldbourne, near Marlborough