CHRISTMAS: I AM sure that your readers, like me, will have had enough of shopping by the time the shops shut on Christmas Eve and they will be looking forward to a day at home with friends and family on December 25.

That is the kind of Christmas Day that we want for Britain's 2.6 million shopworkers.

However, year on year more and more shops are opening their doors on Christmas Day, forcing our members to go to work. Even Scrooge let his staff have Christmas Day off!

January 7, 2004, will see the first reading of Durham North Labour MP Kevan Jones' Christmas Day (Trading) Bill, which will stop all large stores opening on Christmas Day in England and Wales.

Your readers can help our campaign by writing again to their own MP asking that they support the Christmas Day (Trading) Bill when it comes before the Commons.

Christmas Day is a very special day and we believe it should remain so. - Sir Bill Connor, General Secretary, Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers (Usdaw).

SADDAM HUSSEIN

THE capture of Saddam was a brilliant success, but ultimate victory in Iraq is still a very long way off indeed.

And it could all have been so different. At the time of their liberation, enormous goodwill existed among the Iraqi people towards the US and Britain.

Deplorably, that goodwill was needlessly frittered away by the inexcusable neglect of the Pentagon and the MoD to provide for the effective administration of Iraq after the removal of Saddam.

As a result, the Iraqi people, a prey to bandits and service breakdowns, were not much better off post-Saddam than before.

It is any wonder so many have turned against us?

But all is not lost. A solid core of support for the occupying forces still exists as evidenced by the jubilation at Saddam's capture and they need to recognise the urgency of building on that.

A high profile psychological campaign to win over the Iraqi people is now as vital as the ongoing military one. Failing which, I foresee only bloodshed of indefinite duration and futility. - Tony Kelly, Crook.

GHOST SHIPS

WHO is the idiot who called these ex-American warships ghost ships?

They are old ships due for dismantling. Let us thank the Hartlepool company which won the contract to dismantle these old ships and provide work for 200 men.

I sailed 20 years on a castle class frigate with the weather ships. At no time were these ships, built in the 1940s, called ghost ships. - Jim Race, Durham.

CHILD POVERTY

WHILST I agree totally in the principle of helping to eradicate destitution and child poverty, I'm not sure where John Beech (HAS, Dec 16) gets his statistics from. Four million families under the poverty line, a third of all UK children live in poverty and a further one million in extreme poverty.

If these figures are solely due to the "invisible" minority who take the lion's share of national wealth, then I would be utterly ashamed of how my taxes were spent.

Whilst I see a minority of folk who desperately need assistance, those who fall through the net and don't have the means of accessing the correct pot of money, are we as a nation not hiding from the real threat posed by bad parenting and the continued undermining of happy family life?

It is with sadness that I truly think much of the blame for child poverty is simply down to rotten parents who are happy to spend their own wealth on baccy and beer with little consideration for their children, who are blameless for their own plight.

Sort out bad parents and we'll go a long way to helping all our children. - Jim Tague, Bishop Auckland Conservatives.

EUROPE

THE farcical end to the bid to bulldoze through an EU constitution was wholly predictable. Negotiations stalled over Poland and Spain's insistence that they would not be robbed of the votes they were given at Nice.

Sure enough, the talks collapsed. Giscard's constitution, like some sad old firework, fizzled off into the long grass.

The reason why the constitution was never going to work was that Giscard hadn't sorted the fundamental contradiction which has bedevilled the debate over the EU's future for three years - the battle between two wholly incompatible views.

On one side has been the traditional view of how the 'government of Europe' was meant to work, right back to when the 'project' was launched by Jean Monnet in 1950. The core of the 'Monnet method', was that Europe's ruling power must be 'supranational'. The purpose of this was to prevent smaller countries being dominated by larger countries, which was why right at the start Monnet devised the idea of 'qualified majority voting', weighting voting power in such a way that France and Germany could not push around the little guys.

But ever since de Gaulle, the French in particular have tried to reassert their status as one of the two 'big powers'. What the French wanted, no one more than Chirac, was the 'directoire method', whereby Europe is essentially run by a 'directory' of France and Germany.

Giscard's hidden agenda was to resolve the battle in France and Germany's favour, by giving them enough votes to dominate the show, at the expense of all those smaller countries dismissed by the French as the 'dwarves'.

Where does this leave Tony 'only a tidying up exercise' Blair?

His position to deny the people a referendum on this fundamental change in the way we are to be governed is untenable.

Any attempt to govern without the consent of the people is doomed to failure, and the EU has no democratic mandate from any of the people across the EU. - Neil Herron, Sunderland.

REGIONAL GOVERNMENT

IT was interesting to read (HAS, Dec 16) Coun Nick Wallis describe his panecea for the ills of the North-East.

He spells out in absolute and correct detail the detrimental effect his Labour Government and his Government's appointed quangos have had on our region.

He then goes on to propose all will be well in the North-East if we all support Labour's new quango of unelected people, a Regional Assembly.

For some reason I feel a cold shiver down my spine. - Coun Charles Johnson, Darlington Borough Council.