Like Beth Riding (Austria lowered the voting age for young people like me, and transformed politics. The UK should do the same, 29 May), I would like to see the voting age reduced to 16. I’d go further, though: why not assign different numbers of votes to people according to their age? So 16- to 30-year-olds would get five votes each, 30- to 40-year-olds four votes, and 40- to 50-year-olds three, and over-50s a single vote. Imagine what that would do to the political parties’ priorities. By the way, I’m 60.
Mark Walford
London
• Emma Brockes is right to cherish the lunch break, but working through it is not the only problem (They say the lunch break is dying – but don’t give up your hour of freedom, 30 May). We still refer to a lunch “hour”, but this has long ceased to be a reality for most people – the average UK lunch break is just 33 minutes long, according to a 2023 survey by Compass Group and Mintel.
Paul McGilchrist
Cromer, Norfolk
• You report (29 May) that Waitrose is the only major supermarket with more Conservative voters than Labour supporters as customers. Let’s hear it for Guardian-reading pensioners who shop in Waitrose and have never voted Tory in their lives – and aren’t starting now.
Pam Lunn
Kenilworth, Warwickshire
• If the Tories are looking for “low-value” degrees to shut down (Report, 28 May), PPE at Oxford seems to have just given us a long list of useless politicians.
Norman Miller
Brighton
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