Letters: Why aren’t Italians fighting for their liberty?

Wage concern

Sir: Martin Vander Weyer’s call for higher wages to end the shortage of British HGV drivers (‘Your country needs you at the wheel of a lorry’, 7 August) should be extended to other hard-pressed economic areas which have lost cheap labour from the poorer EU countries. For far too long, farming, hospitality, construction, care homes and other vital services have failed to recruit and train local staff or pay a decent wage. Low wages at the bottom of the economy increase the cost of social welfare benefits, bring in less or no money from income tax and VAT and thus adversely affect the whole economy.

David Thompson

Capel St Mary, Suffolk

Growth industry

Sir: It is good news that companies paying minimum wages to farm labourers cannot get the workers they need (Any other business, 7 August). The British workers are there, but employers are going to have to pay more to them than they could get away with paying eastern European workers. This will mean that employers will have to find ways of using better paid and better equipped workers to make them more productive. Many older readers will remember when boys were allowed to skip school so that they could help lift the potato crop by hand in the early 1950s. Now farmers lift the crop very efficiently with machinery and sell potatoes at an amazingly low price. That is how capitalism works to everyone’s advantage: not by importing cheap foreign labour.

John Mustoe

Rome truths

Sir: It is misleading to suggest that demonstrators have ‘filled squares throughout the country’ in Italy (‘That’s amoral’, 7 August). The impression given that tens of thousands of Italians have taken to the streets as they have in France is false.