SIR – The Chinese Communist Party represents the single greatest threat to Britain and the freedom-loving West.

Our next Conservative Party leader and prime minister must understand this threat, stand up to China and take the lead on the world stage in doing so.

Britain must defend Western values, protect our infrastructure and intellectual property, and ensure the Chinese Communist Party does not infiltrate our educational institutions.

British schools and universities are too reliant on a network of Confucius Institutes – the highest number of any country – to co-ordinate teaching of Mandarin. New Confucius Institutes still open each year in Britain. In other countries, including the United States, universities are stopping partnerships with Confucius Institutes. The British Government should ban them.

Britain must also stand with our allies against Chinese cyber-threats, building on security partnerships such as Five Eyes and Aukus.

We need a leader who can create a broad alliance of countries and reduce reliance by our telecommunications on state-linked Chinese vendors. He must use every lever to help British businesses counter Chinese industrial espionage. Rishi Sunak is the leader that will take the tough action needed.

Andrew Bowie MP (Con) Alicia Kearns MP (Con) Kevin Hollinrake MP (Con) London SW1

SIR – The next few weeks will reveal the true calibre of Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss. Given the huge importance of the result, Conservative Party members should take their time before deciding which candidate to support.

Dr Catherine Horwood London NW3

SIR – Professor Patrick Minford (report, July 23) forecasts that interest rates might rise to 7 per cent and this would only kill off “zombie companies” as it tames inflation by slowing the economy.

Geoffrey Howe in the 1980s raised interest rates to 17 per cent, when, as well as killing weak companies, it also destroyed swathes of good ones, greatly to our economic detriment.

There is no mathematical correlation between raising interest rates and stopping inflation. It is just a blunt instrument that can have very perverse results. As the cost of mortgages rockets, so does demand for inflation-adjusted wages, and thus fuel is added to the inflationary fire.

Today, when our inflation is largely caused by the surging price of energy and grain (recently compounded by Rishi Sunak’s National Insurance and Living Wage rises, on top of green taxes), putting up interest rates severely would repeat mistakes of the past.

So Liz Truss is right to learn from the past. She deserves wide support.

SIR – Instead of raising taxes, how about cutting expenditure?

SIR – Chris Hodson’s suggestion that 5,200 patients fail to attend their appointments at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham each week (Letters, July 25) may not be entirely accurate.

My husband received a letter telling him he had cancelled an appointment – but this appointment had never been arranged. The same thing has happened to other people I know.

It appears that hospital administrators are failing to make appointments, then placing the blame on patients by saying that they have cancelled. If patients are recorded as having “cancelled” on more than two occasions, they have to start the referral process again.

Hospital administration has not been fit for purpose for decades. It is time for a wholesale reorganisation.

SIR – I take issue with the suggestion that “lean” thinking principles have contributed to the NHS’s failures.

The example given is that “spare capacity – in the form of beds per head of population – was seen as wasteful” and “a ‘just in time’ system seen as the ideal”.

I led a consulting organisation that helped to introduce lean principles into the NHS. We taught a limited number of people how to use them. This led to massive increases in day-case throughput at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital, and a huge reduction in mortality rates at Royal Bolton Hospital. It also drastically increased the output rates in A&E departments.

The aim was never to cut capacity, but to improve productivity and patient-care outcomes, so that hospitals could do more with the same resources.

Unfortunately the NHS decided to internalise its “lean team” too soon, before people were properly trained, and this led to a dilution of results. Consultants were judged on their absolute costs or daily rates, rather than the return on investment they achieved, which resulted in a premature withdrawal of the support the NHS needed to make the lean approach a success.

I recently spent a month in an NHS hospital. I was asked the same questions over and over again, saw dangerous errors being made as I moved from person to person, and witnessed people suffering because they weren’t part of a clearly defined treatment pathway. These are all things that lean tools and techniques could help to prevent.

SIR – I sympathise with David Pearson (Letters, July 23), whose Yorkshire accent was mocked when he worked at a bank. I have a Cornish accent, and put up with “oo arr” a lot when I worked in the City.

In addition, although I am not Jewish, because of my name I have experienced anti-Semitic remarks all my life – especially if I win a raffle.

SIR – If the powers that be want householders to use less energy, they should change the building regulations to ensure that all new houses come with a cleat, to which a washing line can be attached, along with a post.

Presently, builders assume that we all use tumble dryers.

SIR – The French go-slow at Dover (Letters, July 25) has prompted several commentators on the Left to trot out the usual fallacies about how Brexit has deprived us of the unalloyed advantage of free movement.

Free movement was never about going through passport control more quickly, or having fun gap years in Bologna. It was always about keeping wages low for blue-collar workers by providing a limitless supply of cheap labour to Britain, France and Germany from poorer EU countries.

The Labour Party understood this before it lost its soul to Islington and Richmond upon Thames.

Alison Levinson Hastings, East Sussex

SIR – Pierre-Henri Dumont, a French MP whose constituency includes Calais, said: “We need to stamp every passport. We need checks on who is coming into the European Union.”

I commend this approach by the EU, and France in particular, for if they check the passport of every non-EU traveller and ask the reason for the holder’s visit to the EU, they will be able to apprehend all asylum seekers at source and stop illegal immigration.

SIR – I flew from London City Airport to the EU on Monday and there were no passport checks on departing. Mine was checked at my destination.

The solution to the Dover problem is to tear up the 2004 Le Touquet Treaty and put the French border controls back in Calais and Dunkirk.

SIR – It’s undoubtedly time to remind the French government that British tourists contribute around £5 billion annually to the French economy.

John B Winterburn Earlswood, Warwickshire

SIR – When we lived in a farmhouse, a pair of house martins would return each year and make a nest above the porch light (Letters, July 25).

I used to worry about the babies falling out of the nest and landing on the stone floor so I put down a thick foam mattress, only to find our cats lying happily and expectantly on it. It became a full-time job protecting the usual two batches of fledglings.

I was always torn between relief and sadness when they migrated.

SIR – Travelling from Zurich to Innsbruck some years ago, our train was held at signals west of the Arlberg Tunnel. Beside the track was a carpet of wild strawberries (report, July 23), so, knowing that the tunnel was single-track and that we would not be moving until a westbound train had passed, I climbed down to the track and picked handfuls to share with my travelling companion. Delicious.

SIR – Jack Rear’s journey to John O’Groats by electric vehicle didn’t persuade me to buy one.

I live in Dorset. If I fill my diesel Volkswagen Golf with fuel (costing approximately £110 from empty) it will take me and three passengers to Edinburgh without having to stop 45 minutes here or an hour and a half there in order to fill up. Nor will I have to worry about my fuel consumption if I need to use the wipers, headlights or air con. If I did stop for fuel, I wouldn’t have to worry about whether the nozzle would fit the filler pipe.

Mr Rear appears to be a fit younger person. How would a woman with a couple of children in the car manage? I wouldn’t like to think of my wife hanging about in some miserable store car park for hours, trapped while the wretched car slowly charges up.

I’ll run our reliable fossil-fuelled car for as long as I can. Maybe I’ll consider a self-charging hybrid, but not an EV.

SIR – Jack Rear says that “the stress of electric cars has mostly evaporated”. Really?

His long-distance drive sounds hellish to me, with constantly worry about finding a charging point that works. Most of us don’t have the hours it takes to seek one, let alone use it.

Electric vehicles are being forced upon us, at huge cost, without consultation. They are simply not green. Instead of displaying “emissions free” badges they should say “emissions elsewhere”.

SIR – I read with great interest and concern that National Grid was forced to issue an emergency appeal to Belgium for energy because of demand during the recent heatwave.

Thank goodness that we do not all have electric cars.

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