SIR - I'm a fan of Peter Hitchens. He doesn't apologise for expressing controversial or conservative views.
One of his famous bombshells is that there is no such thing as addiction. So news that MPs are calling for the UK government to put vaping free on the NHS to help people stop smoking will be another red rag to him. Let's be honest, giving up smoking is easy, I did it many times.
Hitchens is right to say that the notion of personal responsibility is in decline. That's why we talk about rehabilitation for criminals as though they are all ill, when most of them made a conscious decision to do a bad thing. Incredibly, the term rehabilitation is used more for the perpetrators than the victims of crime.
The problem is that many of the hippies of the 1960s have since reached administrative age. Some of them have achieved positions of influence in public life and politics. And their liberal ideologies have become the mainstream political doctrine across all the main parties, affecting almost all legislation we see.
Alan Bates, Bowland Avenue, Baildon
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