I SINCERELY hope that we shall be hearing something more substantial than the swish of wielded handbags from the Labour and Tory prospective Parliamentary candidates in the next few weeks (Michael Foster, You Say, April 11 and Richard Adams, You Say, April 19).

These contributions were what you would expect to hear off-stage between contestants in a beauty contest, not the challenges about serious issues that we have a right to expect in a General Election campaign.

Under our democracy, a General Election is the one opportunity we have to raise a whole raft of political concerns and where our candidates stand on them.

For me, the personal qualities of candidates will emerge in the way they deal with these, not from them blowing their own trumpets and directing raspberries at each other.

For example, we live in a world whose environment is under threat from the greed of multi-national corporations, and whose poorest people sell their children into slavery to provide us with chocolate bars and company shareholders with fat dividends, including our own pension funds.

The pressures created by these inequalities break out into ethnic conflicts and civil wars, creating refugees who end up seeking asylum in the rich West, including Britain, and who can blame them?

We are then expected to send our soldiers to these "trouble spots" on the coat tails of the Americans. The West has the resources to help the poor develop but choose to spend them

instead, in the case of the US, on a ridiculous missile defence system. We are expected to support this to allow the US to go on exploiting and polluting, putting more pressures on our own economy.

Let's hear where the candidates stand on these and other issues, and what they are made of. By that, I don't mean just parroting their party manifestos but demonstrating that they are people of substance with beliefs and convictions that they have the ability to articulate.

PETER NIELSEN,

Worcester.