LETTERS : Lessons on the social divide

JUDITH Judd reports disabling funding reductions in state schools as "the worst government spending cuts for decades" ("Schools facing huge cash cuts", 1 January).

This same government insistently defends taxpayers' subsidies of independent schools, which serve a generally wealthy minority. As it must be in the public interest to develop a properly educated population, and as the large tax increases imposed upon usmust have raised enough money for this, we must ask why the Government is so bent on obstructing any measures that might put an end to the social stratification which has so crippled this country, and what they are doing with the money they are taking from us.

These are moral issues, and it is a pity that Tony Blair is so unprepared to raise them.

Michael Rosenthal Banbury, Oxon