I TOTALLY agree with the sentiments expressed recently whereby every candidate should be judged on his/her own merits when voting in local government elections. That would be true democracy.

But that was the good method carried out in the past. Now, the world and politics have changed. Individual, thoroughly decent and high-minded candidates can no longer be the voice crying out in the wilderness because very quickly the strong groups will smother that righteous voice into nothingness.

These days there can be no such person as an Independent candidate even if they form an Association of Independents.

They must have the guts and courage of their own convictions to join in the name of the party to whom they feel most affiliated. But they are not powerful enough to prevent the europhile Labour/Lib Dems from abandoning our country to the unelected bureaucrats in Brussels.

Our immediate hope now is to recreate powerful Conservative local governments. The Tories are the only party who promised to prevent the wholesale demolition of Great Britain.

JAMES H ALEXANDER,

Symonds Yat, Herefordshire.