1. Rural areas are liable to decline if their infrastructure and services – public transport, education, GP practices, cottage hospitals, street lighting, etc – are not effectively funded and supported. Unless these are of a good standard and accessibility, businesses will not be established in rural areas, those already there will be unable to attract workers, and this will run counter to the government’s own policy (see Truss, E., 2014, “Stimulating Economic Growth in Rural Areas”, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs). 2. Those who live in rural areas are entitled to a reasonable standard of services and national infrastructure. The cuts in grant to local authorities have made it impossible for rural counties to maintain services and infrastructure at a level anywhere near comparable to that provided in metropolitan areas. 3. Some government policies have been implemented without consideration for the impact on rural areas – e.g. the raising of the school/training leaving age to 18, requiring all young people to reach centres of population on a daily basis, while councils are forced to remove subsidy for buses that could get them there and no government provision has been made for this. Thanks to LM and AB

We need to know the correct statistics for unemployment, so that the people of the UK know the correct amount of people who truly are unemployed!

If investors stop funding these damaging industries they will have to change their view of the world and maybe even consider diversifying into the renewable energy sector which will not only clean up the planet but provide millions of jobs which will do more for the economy than unconventional gas and oil.

Our students are our future

After the debacle of Rail privatisation and the fall in the level of service witnessed over the last decade on our railways, the last thing we need is a purely profit driven ownership of Eurostar looking merely at the short term in order to provide a return at any cost to their investors. This privatisation is purely ideologically driven and takes no consideration of the needs - short or long term - of Eurostar or, especially, it's users.The Governments of France and Belgium are considering increasing their share of the ownership of Eurostar (at British tax-payers expense as the profits will all go to alleviate the tax burden of other countries) whilst ours is so driven by an ideological distaste for any nationally owned service that they will press ahead with privatisation at any cost and regardless of the value of that privatisation to the current owners of the service - you! It must further be asked, can we trust a civil service which oversaw the huge loss to taxpayers through the undervaluation and mismanagement of The Royal Mail and RBS (where even according to the Telegraph taxpayers faced a loss of £1bn and £10bn respectively)? Please show Mr Osbourne and the Treasury your dislike of this half-baked plan to rush through privatisation before the next election.

We are continually told that MPs are on our side and understand what ordinary voters are going through. USA presidents publish tax information but UK politicians balk at the thought. Why should we not see how they earn their income and who might they be favouring in their policies. If they have nothing to hide why not publish and be damned or not as the case may be.

Repeatedly the benefits bill has been discussed by politicians and the media as being too large that we cannot afford it, despite it including housing benefits, pensions, disability allowances and job seeker's allowance, all of which help the poor, old, sick and unemployed in a time of need. The details of these social benefits are well known and publicised. The Conservatives have just promised to freeze this benefits bill to help cut the budget deficit if they are elected at the next election. Recent research published in the Guardian [1] has shown that at least £85bn was given to large corporations by the government to help make the rich richer in the financial year 2011-12 alone, but with the budget deficit we just cannot afford it. This information was hidden; it is about time that the government publishes the amount given in corporate benefits - so called wealthfare - and starts considering this costly expense as an area to cut to reduce the budget deficit instead of welfare because the poor cannot cope with anymore cuts. We are all in it together, as Prime Minister David Cameron keeps saying. We've cut social benefits, it's now time to cut corporate benefits. [1] Aditya Chakrabortty, "Cut benefits? Yes, let’s start with our £85bn corporate welfare handout", The Guardian, Monday 6 October 2014 20.30 BST, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/06/benefits-corporate-welfare-research-public-money-businesses.

We know there are thousands of dementia [and other disease sufferers] in need of nursing, not just personal care. If they manage to find out about the processes and arm themselves with a copy of the DST they are in with half a chance but it is only half a chance. Result = pay through the nose for care which the patient has already paid into the NHS and tax system for them to provide

I have a good deal of contact with older people, who often have increasing difficulty retaining information because of failing memory. I have also had contact with people experiencing significant difficulties because of learning disabilities or brain diseases, eg. dementia. These conditions often also affect a person's mobility and it is not so easy for them to simply visit the bank or Building Society and re-assert their identity, with the support of utility bills, passports, etc. Both of my parents are tragically affected by Alzheimers Disease. My father remains, for now, independently managing his own affairs (with considerable time and support from others). I have seen at first-hand the terrible frustration he experiences when trying to transact, or obtain information over the 'phone when agents are unable to help because he can't tell them the security information; he is unable even to recall his address of the past 2 years. I see that it may be difficult to find a suitable alternative to memory-reliant methods to assure security but I believe the problem to be an urgent and common one. The institutions holding our money must provide the means for us all to access their services, no matter our age, memory or health status.

Until just a few years ago we, as a nation, were beholden to the USA under the terms and conditions of the Lend-Lease agreement during World War 2. We have paid our debt to the USA in full, both in cash - with massive interest - and in human lives. We no longer have to join in their wars and we should be a peaceful island nation which just gets on with our global neighbours and trades peacefully with them.....rather than being a belligerent nation which spends a disproportionate amount of its GDP on its military and getting involved in warfare that we can't afford. Wouldn't our nation be so much better if we used this money to make life in the UK better and healthier for the people who live here? Warfare is paid for from the taxes we pay - we choose that our tax is spent on positive outcomes for the people of the UK, instead of bombing distant countries just because they have an issue with the USA.

Nurse are not paid enough as it is, and their pay rises are pitifully small. Yet the annual registration fee is set for a 20% rise.

Public spending has grown fortyfold since the start of the 20th century and no new mechanisms have been introduced to oversee this. We can: address the democratic deficit; increase accountability and control over government; update democracy for the digital age, applying time-honoured democratic principles with new technology; directly mandate policies, not political parties; and make the civil service more efficient by attaching budgets to policies, not time periods.