DAVE DALTON quite rightly asks “Why should we need crowd-funding, last minute rescues, and company sponsorship to support a public service?”

However, in reality we don’t even have to wait for enough money in the tax coffers to pay for these services.

Sterling is a fiat currency, which means it is a currency established as money by government regulation or law.

Sterling belongs to the Government. Therefore our Government is perfectly entitled to create as much of it as it chooses, as evidenced by its creation of £435bn quantitative easing since 2009, which has gone straight into the financial markets, making the rich richer and the poor poorer.

This money could have been better used as a sovereign currency and spent directly into improving our infrastructure and maintaining our public services.

While there maybe good reasons to claim some of such sovereign money back from its citizens afterwards in the form of tax, as eloquently pointed out by Richard Murphy in his excellent book The Joy of Tax, there is absolutely no necessity whatsoever, to deprive us of essential public services due to lack of funds.

Neither is there any need at all for the Government or any of us to borrow our money into existence, which is the way in which 97 per cent of all our money is created at present, holding us all in debt slavery.

Susan Holden, Richmond

DAVE DALTON must surely know the answer to his question that the words “public service” no longer mean what they used to.

Buses now have to make a profit for their operators and if they don’t the routes are axed. This is a big problem in rural areas where passenger numbers are small and consist mainly of older people with free bus passes.

They would be willing to make a donation or even pay half price, but are not allowed to by law - because David Cameron made free bus passes a manifesto promise when he was prime minister.

In the same issue our MP, Rishi Sunak, saluted the volunteers who keep the buses running. The “continued funding from central Government” to which he refers is, I understand, £1 per bus-pass journey, whatever the the distance travelled. With Government funding cuts to local councils they are continuing to cut back on many services the public used to take for granted.

So now residents have to staff local libraries, drive minibuses, provide hospital transport, cut grass verges etc. – the list goes on.

Call me cynical but, given the state of politics in England at the present time, I do not have Mr Dalton’s faith in our power to change things by the way we vote.

I vote out of a sense of duty to the women who in the past fought to get me the vote – not out of allegiance to a particular political party.

Sheila Simms, Leyburn