STEVE Metcalfe continues to be long on rhetoric and short on facts (Letters last week).

He tells us that political democracy is almost useless unless there is firstly real freedom from hunger, illiteracy, homelessness, ill health, unemployment and endless imperialist wars'.

He then claims that none of these freedoms can be attained under the present system of monopoly capitalism.

Apart from the last freedom, all of the others have been secured in the US and the UK. And I do not consider the war in Iraq an imperialist venture but a selfless effort to bring these freedoms to the Iraqi people.

Monopoly capitalism? What of all the regulations that limit monopolies in both the US and UK? As I have pointed out many a time already, no nation is either wholly capitalist or wholly socialist.

Problems in the former Soviet Union are the legacy of socialism, not of capitalism. The lives of the citizens of the now free former republics will improve as capitalism takes further hold.

Robert Segal, Lancaster.